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A HISTORY OF 

AMERICAN LITERATURE 

SINCE 1870 



BY 

FRED LEWIS PATTEE 

Professor of the English Language and Literature in the Pennsylvania 

State College. Author of **A History of American Literature," 

"The Poems of Philip Freneau," "The Foundations of 

English Literature," etc. 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 






^^^o^ 



Copyright, 1915, "by 
The Century Co. 

Published, October 1915 






TO DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 
AND THE DARTMOUTH MEN 
OF THE EIGHTIES, STU- 
DENTS AND PROFESSORS, 
AMONG WHOM I FIRST 
AWOKE TO THE MEANING 
OF LITERATURE AND OF 
LIFE, THIS BOOK IS IN- 
SCRIBED WITH FULL HEART. 



/^^ 



PREFACE 

jA-merifTTi literature in the larger sense of the term began with 
Irving, ai. if we count The Sketch Book as the beginning, the 
centennial year of its birth is yet four years hence. It has been 
a custom, especially among the writers of text-books, to divide 
this century into periods, and all have agreed at one point : in the 
mid-thirties undoubtedly there began a new and distinct literary 
movement. The names given to this new age, which corresponded 
in a general way with the Victorian Era in England, have been 
various. It has been called the Age of Emerson, the Tran- 
scendental Period, the National Period, the Central Period. 
National it certainly was not, but among the other names there is 
little choice. Just as with the Victorian Era in England, not 
fluch has been said as to when the period ended. There has been 
no official closing, though it has been long evident that all the 
forces that brought it about have long since expended themselves 
and that a distinctively new period has not only begun but has 
already quite run its course. 

It has been our object to determine this new period and to 
study its distinguishing characteristics. We have divided the 
literary history of the century into three periods, denominating 
them as the Knickerbocker Period, the New England Period, and 
the National Period, and we have made the last to begin shortly 
after the close of the Civil War with those new forces and new 
ideals and broadened views that grew out of that mighty struggle. 

The field is a new one : no other book and no chapter of a book 
;.dS ever attempted to handle it as a unit. It is an important 
on-': it is our first really national period, all-American, au- 
tochthonic. It was not until after the war tliat our writers 
ceased to imitate and looked to their own land for material and 
inspiration. The amount of its literary product has been amaz- 
ing. There have been single years in which have been turned 
out more volumes than were produced during all of the Knicker- 
bocker Period. The quality of this output has been uniformly 
high. In 1902 a writer in Harper's Weekly while reviewing a 



PREFACE 

book by Stockton dared even to say: ''He belonged to that 
great period between 1870 and 1890 which is as yet the greatest 
in our literary history, whatever the greatness of any future time 
may be." The statement is strong, but it is true. Despite 
Lowell's statement, it was not until after the Civil War that 
America achieved in any degree her literary independence. One 
can say of the period what one may not say of earlier periods, 
that the great mass of its writings could have been produced no- 
where else but in the United States. They are redolent of the 
new spirit of America : they are American literature. 

In our study of this new national period we have considered 
only those authors who did their first distinctive work before 
1892. Of that large group of writers born after the beginning 
of the period and borne into their work by forces that had little 
connection with the great primal impulses that came from the 
Civil War and the expansion period that followed, we have said 
nothing. We have given the names of a few of them at the 
close of chapter 17, but their work does not concern our study. 
A¥e have limited ourselves also by centering our attention upon 
the three literary forms, poetry, fiction, and the essay. History 
we have neglected largely for the reasons given at the opening of 
chapter 18, and the drama for the reason that before 1892 there 
was produced no American drama of any literary value. 

We would express here our thanks to the many librarians and 
assistants who have cooperated toward the making of the book 
possible, and especially would we tender our thanks to Professor 
R, W, Conover of the Kansas Agricultural College who helped 
to prepare the index. 

F, L, P. 
State College, Pennsylvania, 

July 31, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

I THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 3 

,_ II THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 25 

III MARK TWAIN 45 

y^ BRET HARTE 63 

uV "THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 83 

VI JOAQUIN MILLER 99 

VII THE TRANSITION POETS HG 

VIII RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 137 

IX WALT WHITMAN 163 

X THE CLASSICAL REACTION 186 

XI RECORDERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 220 

XII THE NEW ROMANCE 244 

XIII LATER POETS OP THE SOUTH 271 

XIV THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS . . . .294 
XV THE LATER POETS 321 

XVI THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 355 

XVII SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 385 

XVIII THE ESSAYISTS 416 

INDEX 441 



A HISTORY OF 

AMERICAN LITERATURE 

SINCE 1870 



A HISTORY OF 

AMERICAN LITERATURE 

SINCE 1870 

CHAPTER I 

THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 
I 

We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a divid- 
ing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that 
burned across French history by the Revolution. That the South 
had been vastly affected by the war was manifest from the fii-st. 
The widespread destruction of property, the collapse of the labor 
system, and the fall of the social regime founded on negro slavery, 
had been so dramatic and so revolutionary in their results that 
they had created everywhere a feeling that the ultimate effects 
of the war were confined to the conquered territory. Grady's 
phrase, "the new South," and later the phrase, "the end of an 
era," passing everywhere current, served to strengthen the im- 
pression. That the North had been equally affected, that there 
also an old regime had perished and a new era been inaugurated, 
was not so quickly realized. The change there had been un- 
dramatic ; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompani- 
ments that had been so romantic and even sensational in the 
South ; but with the perspective of half a century we can see now 
that it had been no less thoroughgoing and revolutionary. 

The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting 
of vast numbers of the population from a position of productive- 
ness to one of dependence. A people who knew only peace and 
who were totally untrained even in the idea of war were called 
upon suddenly to furnish one of the largest armies of modem 



4 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

times and to fight to an end the most bitterly contested conflict 
of a century. First and last, upwards of two millions of men, 
the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn all of them from the 
most efficient productive class, were mustered into the federal 
service alone. It changed in a moment the entire equilibrium of 
American industrial life. This great unproductive army had to 
be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously waste- 
ful occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great trans- 
portation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men 
for the regiments. The wheatfields had no harvesters ; the Miss- 
issippi, the great commercial outlet of the West, had been closed 
by the war, and the railroads were insufficient to handle the 
burden. 

The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in 
the North that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in 
the harvest fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and 
the reaper and the mowing machine for the first time sprang into 
widespread use; the strain upon the railroads brought increased 
energy and efficiency and capital to bear upon the problem of 
transportation, and it was swiftly solved. Great meat-packing 
houses arose to meet the new conditions ; shoes had to be sent to 
the front in enormous numbers and to produce them a new and 
marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in hitherto 
unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily, 
and to make it Howe's sewing machine was evolved. It was a 
period of giant tasks thrust suddenly upon a people seemingly un- 
prepared. The vision of the country became all at once enlarged. 
Companies were organized for colossal undertakings. Values 
and wealth arose by leaps and bounds. Nothing seemed impos- 
sible. 

The war educated America. It educated first the millions of 
men who were enrolled in the armies. With few exceptions the 
soldiers were boys who had never before left their native neigh- 
borhoods. From the provincial little round of the farm or the 
shop, all in a moment they plunged into regions that to them 
were veritable foreign lands to live in a world of excitement and 
stress, with ever-shifting scenes and ever-deepening responsibili- 
ties, for three and four and even five years. Whole armies of 
young men came from the remote hills of New England. Massa- 
chusetts alone sent 159,000. The diffident country lad was 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 5 

trained harshly in the roughest of classrooms. He was forced to 
measure himself with men. 

The whole nation was in the classroom of war. The imperious 
call for leaders of every grade and in all ranks of activity devel- 
oped everywhere out of raw material captains of men, engineers, 
organizers, business directors, financiers, inventors, directors of 
activities, on a scale before undreamed of in America. It was a 
college course in which were developed efficiency and self-reliance 
and wideness of vision and courage and restless activity, and it 
produced a most remarkable generation of men. 

The armies in the field and those other armies that handled the 
railroads and the mills and the finances and supplies, were sons 
all of them of a race that had been doubly picked in the genera- 
tions before, for only the bravest and most virile in body and 
soul had dared to break from their old-world surroundings and 
plunge into the untracked West, and only the fittest of these had 
survived the rigors of pioneer days. And the war schooled this 
remnant and widened their vision and ground out of them the 
provincialism that had held them so long to narrow horizons. It 
was not until 1865 that Emerson could write, "We shall not 
again disparage America now we have seen what men it will 
bear. ' ' But the chief difference between these men and the early 
men that had so filled him with apprehension in the thirties and 
the forties, was in the schooling which had come from the five 
years of tension when the very life of the nation was in danger. 

The disbanding of the armies was followed by a period of rest- 
lessness such as America had never before known. The whole 
population was restless. "War," says Emerson, "passes the 
power of all chemical solvents, breaking up the old adhesions 
and allowing the atoms of society to take a new order. ' ' The war 
had set in motion mighty forces that did not stop when peace 
was declared. Men who had been trained by the war for the 
organizing and directing of vast activities turned quickly to new 
fields of effort. The railroads, which had been vastly enlarged 
and enriched by the war, pushed everywhere now with marvelous 
rapidity ; great industries, like the new oil industry, sprang into 
wealth and power. The West, lying vast and unbroken almost 
from the farther bank of the Mississippi, burst into eager life, 
and the tide of migration which even before the war had turned 
strongly toward this empire of the plains quickly became a flood. 



6 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Railroads were pushed along the wild trails and over the Rocky 
Mountains. The first transcontinental road was completed in 
1868. The great buffalo herds were exterminated in the late 
sixties and early seventies; millions of acres of rich land were 
preempted and turned over to agriculture; the greatest wheat 
and corn belts the world has ever known were brought into pro- 
duction almost in a moment ; bridges were flung over rivers and 
caiions; vast cities of the plain arose as by magic. Everywhere 
a new thrill was in the air. The Civil War had shaken America 
into eager, restless life. Mark Twain, who was a part of it all, 
could say in later days : ' ' The eight years in America from 1860 
to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the 
politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the coun- 
try, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national char- 
acter that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three 
generations. ' ' ^ 

To-day we can begin to see the effect which the mighty exodus 
that followed the war had upon the East. It was little short of 
revolution. New England had taken the leading place in pre- 
cipitating the struggle between the States, and she had done it 
for conscience' sake, and now, though she had won all she had 
asked, by a curious turn of fate she was repaid for her moral 
stand by the loss of her leadership and later almost of her iden- 
tity, for the westward movement that followed the war was in 
New England a veritable exodus. There had always been emi- 
gration from the older States and it had gradually increased 
during the gold rush period and the Kansas-Nebraska excitement, 
but the tide had never been large enough to excite apprehension. 
Now, however, all in a moment the stream became a torrent which 
took away, as does all emigration from older lands, the most 
active and fearless and progressive spirits. Whole districts of 
farming land were deserted with all their buildings and improve- 
ments. New Hampshire in 1860 had a population of 326,073 ; 
in 1870 the population had shrunk to 318,300, and that despite 
the fact that all the cities and manufacturing towns in the State 
had grown greatly during the ten years, the increase consisting 
almost wholly of foreigners. According to Sanborn, ' * more than 
a million acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage 

1 The Oilded Age, uniform edition, 200. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 7 

and woodland in 1900." ^ All growth since the war has been 
confined to the cities and the larger manufacturing towns, and 
this growth and the supplying of the deficit caused by the emi- 
gration of the old stock have come from an ever-increasing influx 
of foreigners. Boston has all but lost its old identity. In Massa- 
chusetts in 1900 nearly one-half of the population was born of 
foreign parentage. New England in a single generation lost its 
scepter of power in the North, and that scepter gradually has 
been moving toward the new West. 



But the change wrought by the war was far more than a rise 
of new activities and a shifting of population. A totally new 
America grew from the ashes of the great conflict. In 1860, 
North and South alike were provincial and self-conscious. New 
York City was an enormously overgrown village, and Boston and 
Philadelphia and Charleston were almost as individual and as 
unlike one another as they had been in the days of the Revolution. 
There had been nothing to fuse the sections together and to bring 
them to a common vision. The drama of the settlement had been 
fierce and piteous, but it had been a great series of local episodes. 
The Revolution had not been a melting pot that could fuse all the 
sections into a unity. The war which had begun in New England 
had drifted southward and each battle, especially toward the end, 
had been largely a local affair. Until 1860, there had been no 
passion fierce enough to stir to the very center of their lives all 
of the people, to melt them into a homogeneous mass, and to pour 
them forth into the mold of a new individual soul among the 
nations. The emphasis after 1870 was not upon the State but 
upon the Nation. As early as 1867 a writer in the North Ameri- 
can Review declared that, "The influence of our recent war in 
developing the 'National Sentiment' of the people can hardly be 
overestimated. ' ' ^ Now there came national banks, national se- 
curities, a national railroad, a national college sj^stem, — every- 
where a widening horizon. Provincialism was dying in every 
part of the land. 

Until 1860, America had been full of the discordant individ- 
uality of youth. Its characteristics, all of them, had been char- 

2 Sanborn's New Hampshire, 317. 

3 North American Review, 104:301. 



8 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

aeteristies of that turbulent, unsettled period before character had 
hardened into its final form. From 1820 to 1860 the nation was 
adolescent. In everything at least that concerned its intellectual 
life it was imitative and dependent. It was in its awkward era, 
and like every youth was uncouth and sensitive and self-con- 
scious. It asked eagerly of every foreign visitor, ''And what do 
you think of us ? " and when the answer, as in the case of Moore 
or Marryat or Dickens, was critical, it flew into a passion. It 
was sentimental to silliness. As late as 1875 the editor of Scrih- 
ner's declared that a large number of all the manuscripts sub- 
mitted to publishing houses and periodicals were declined because 
of their sentimentality, and most of the published literature of 
the time, he added, has "a vast deal of sentimentality sugared 
through it. ' ' That was in 1875 ; a few years before that date 
Griswold had published his Female Poets of America, and there 
had flourished the Token, the Forget-Me-Not, and the Amaranth. 
Adolescence is always sad : 

And I think as I sit alone, 

While the night wind is falling around, 

Of a cold white gleaming stone 
And a long, lone, grassy mound. 

The age had sighed and wept over Charlotte Temple, a romance 
which went through edition after edition, and which, according 
to Higginson, had a greater number of readers even in 1870 than 
any single one of the Waverley Novels. 

But even as it sighed over its Charlotte Temple and its Rose- 
hud and its Lamplighter, it longed for better things. It had 
caught a glimpse, through Irving and Willis and Longfellow and 
others, of the culture of older lands. America had entered its 
first reading age. In 1844 Emerson spoke of "our immense 
reading and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of 
the English press." In its eagerness for culture it enlarged its 
area of books and absorbed edition after edition of translations 
from the German and Spanish and French. It established every- 
where the lyceum, and for a generation America sat like an eager 
school-girl at the feet of masters — Emerson and Beecher and 
Taylor and Curtis and Phillips and Gough. 

But adolescent youth is the period, too, of spiritual awaken- 
ings, of religious strugglings, and of the questioning and testing 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 9 

of all that is established. For a period America doubted all 
things. It read dangerous and unusual books — Fourier, St. 
Simon, Swedenborg, Jouffroy, Cousin. It challenged the dogmas 
of the Church. It worked over for itself all the fundamentals 
of religion. A reviewer in the first volume of Scribner's remarks 
of the fall books that, as usual, theology has the best of it. ' ' Our 
poets write theology, our novels are theological . . . even our 
statesmen cannot write without treating theology." * The forties 
and fifties struggled with sensitive conscience over the great prob- 
lems of right and wrong, of altruism and selfish ambition. The 
age was full of dreams ; it longed to right the wrongs of the weak 
and the oppressed; to go forth as champions of freedom and 
abstract right ; and at last it fought it out with agony and sweat 
of blood in the midnight when the stars had hid themselves seem- 
ingly forever. 

The Civil War was the Sturm und Drang of adolescent Amer- 
ica, the Gethsemane through which every earnest young life must 
pass ere he find his soul. He fails to understand the spirit of 
our land who misses this great fact: America discovered itself 
while fighting with itself in a struggle for things that are not 
material at all, but are spiritual and eternal. The difference be- 
tween the America of 1850 and that of 1870 is the difference 
between the youth of sixteen and the man of thirty. Before the 
war the bands of America had played "Annie Laurie" and 
"Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes"; after the war they played 
"Rally round the Flag" and "Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory 
of the Coming of the Lord. ' ' 

III 

The effect of the war upon American literature has been vari- 
ously estimated. Stedman has been quoted often: "The Civil 
War was a general absorbent at the crisis when a second group 
of poets began to form. The conflict not only checked the rise 
of a new school, but was followed by a time of languor in which 
the songs of Apollo seemed trivial to those who had listened to 
the shout of Mars."^ It was Richardson's opinion that "little 
that was notable was added to the literature of the country by 

4 Scribner's Monthly, i : 220. 
6 Poets of America, 437. 



10 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

the Civil "War of 1861. . . . The creative powers of our best 
authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers 
multiplied between 1861 and 1865."^ And Greenough White 
dismisses the matter with the remark that ' ' after the war, Bryant, 
Longfellow, and Taylor, as if their power of original production 
was exhausted, turned to translation. ' ' ^ 

All this lacks perspective, Stedman views the matter from 
the true mid-century standpoint. Poetry to Stedman and Stod- 
dard and Hayne and Aldrich and Taylor was an esoteric, beau- 
tiful thing to be worshiped and followed for itself alone like a 
goddess, a being from another sphere than ours, to devote one's 
soul to, * ' like the lady of Shalott, ' ' to quote Stevenson, ' ' peering 
into a mirror with her back turned on all the bustle and glamour 
of reality." Keats had been the father of this group of poets 
which had been broken in upon rudely by the war, and it had 
been the message of Keats that life with its wretchedness and com- 
monplaceness and struggle was to be escaped from by means of 
Poesy : 

Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee, 
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, 
But on the viewless wings of Poesy. 

But poetry is the voice of life ; it is not an avenue by which to 
escape from life 's problems. The poet springs from his times and 
voices his era because he must. If his era smothers him, then so 
much the less poet he. No war can check the rise of a new school 
of poets if the soul of that new age is one to be expressed in 
poetry. 

What Stedman and the others failed to see was the new Ameri- 
can soul which had been created by the war and which the new 
school, trained in the old conceptions of poetry, was powerless to 
voice. If the creative powers of the leading authors were 
numbed, if Bryant and Longfellow and Taylor felt that their 
power of original production was exhausted and so turned to 
translation, it was because they felt themselves powerless to take 
wing in the new atmosphere. 

The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intel- 
lectual life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social 
regime. Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accom- 

6 Primer of American Literature, revised edition, 77. 

7 Philosophy of American Literature, 65. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 11 

plishments of the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the 
lecturers in the widespread lyceum system when it was at its 
highest point, "those men who made the platform popular and 
useful and apparently indispensable, did not number more than 
twenty-five." The whole New England period was dominated 
by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained the 
most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six mem- 
bers "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." How- 
ells characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say 
Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, 
Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician in the truest and often 
the best sense, if not the largest." It is significant that these 
were all Harvard men. The period was dominated by college 
men. In addition to the names mentioned by Howells, there 
might be added from the New England colleges, Webster, Tick- 
nor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker, 
Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Except- 
ing Poe, who for a time was a student at the University of Vir- 
ginia and at West Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, 
and two women, Margaret Puller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in 
the period when colleges were open only for men, the list contains 
all the leading authors of the mid-period in America. 

With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes de- 
nominates "the Brahmin caste of New England," a term which 
he uses to distinguish them from what he called "the homespun 
class" — "a few chosen families against the great multitude." 
"Their family names are always on some college catalogue or 
other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of literature was very 
little in the hands of the masses; it was in the hands of these 
scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of intellect." 
Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston, "the hub 
of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that holds 
the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy. It 
was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual 
admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each mem- 
ber of the group took himself with great seriousness and was 
taken at his own valuation by the others. Wlien the new demo- 
cratic, after-the-war America, in the person of Mark Twain, 
came into the circle and in the true Western style made free with 
sacred personalities, he was received with frozen silence. 



12 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The school, on the whole, stood aloof from, the civil and re- 
ligious activities of its period. With the exception of Whittier, 
who was not a Brahmin, the larger figures of the era took interest 
in the great issues of their generation only when these issues 
had been forced into the field of their emotions. They were 
bookish men, and they were prone to look not into their hearts 
or into the heart of their epoch, but into their libraries. In 1856, 
when America was smoldering with what so soon was to burst 
out into a maelstrom of fire, Longfellow wrote in his journal, 
' 'Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others. I was amused 
and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into 
politics. It was not till after dinner in the library that we got 
upon anything reallj^ interesting. ' ' ^ The houses of the Brah- 
mins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school 
lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as 
often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries 
of books which they eagerly translated. Even Lowell, the most 
democratic American of the group, save Whittier, wrote from 
Paris in 1873, "In certain ways this side is more agreeable to 
my tastes than the other." And again the next year he wrote 
from Florence : * ' America is too busy, too troubled about many 
things, and Martha is only good to make puddings. ' ' 

Howells in his novel, A 'Woman^s Reason, has given us a view 
of this American worship of Europe during this period. Says 
Lord Rainford, who has been only in Boston and Newport : "I 
find your people — your best people, I suppose they are — ^very 
nice, very intelligent, very pleasant — only talk about Europe. 
They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome ; there 
seems to be quite a passion for Italy ; but they don 't seem inter- 
ested in their own country. I can't make it out. . . . They 
always seem to have been reading the Fortnightly, and the Satur- 
day Review, and the Spectator, and the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
and the last French and English books. It 's very odd." 

Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving 's Sketch 
Book, a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe 
was a wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's Outre Mer and 
Hyperion, Tuckerman's Italian Sketch Book, Willis's Pencillings 
hy the Way, Cooper's Gleanings in Europe, Sanderson's Sketches 
of Paris, Sprague's Letters from Europe, Colton's Four Years in 

8 Longfellow's Henry Wadstvorth Longfellota, ii -. 308. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 13 

Great Britain, Taylor's Views Afoot, Bryant's Letters of a Trav- 
eller, Curtis 's Nile Notes of a Howadji, Greeley's Glances at 
Europe, Mrs. Stowe's Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Nor- 
ton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, Hawthorne's Our Old 
Home, Calvert's Scenes and TJioughts in Europe, and, after the 
war, Howells's Venetian Life, and Hay's Castilian Days are only 
the better-known books of the list. "Our people," complained 
Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from one country and 
their duties from another," and it was so until after the Civil 
War had given to America a vision of her own self. Innocents 
Abroad was the first American book about Europe that stood 
squarely on its own feet and told what it saw without senti- 
mentality or romantic colorings or yieldings to the conventional. 
After Innocents Abroad there were no more rhapsodies of 
Europe. 

America was a new land with a new message and new problems 
and a new hope for mankind — a hope as great as that which had 
fired the imagination of Europe during the years of the French 
Revolution, yet American writers of the mid-century were content 
to look into their books and echo worn old themes of other lands. 
The Holmes who in his youth had written 'Old Ironsides was 
content now with vers de societe, 

I 'm a florist in verse, and what would people say 
If I came to a banquet without my bouquet"? 

And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, 
Stoddard could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like 
trifles like this : 

Why are red roses red? 
For roses once were white, 
Because the loving- nightingales 

Sang on their thorns all night — 
Sang till the blood they shed 
Had dyed the roses red. 

It was a period when both Europe and America were too much 
dominated by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who 
stands aloof from life, retiring into the close-curtained privacy 
of his study to ponder upon some abstract, bloodless, and sexless 
theme for the edification of a blase, over-refined public with 
nerves that can no longer relish the soul-stirring passions and 



14 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

emotions of a healthy and active humanity." In Europe, the 
reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the peasant 
painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with 
Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with 
Ibsen and Bjomson in Norway, workers with whom art was life 
itself. 

America especially had been given to softness and sentimental- 
ism. During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the 
lusty new nation, which was developing a new hope for all man- 
kind, had asked for bread and it had been given all too often 
''lucent syrops tinet with cinnamon." The oratory had been 
eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The prose, great areas of 
it, had been affected, embellished with a certain florid youngman- 
ishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point of bad 
taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he 
made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic 
honey. ' ' It was the time when ornateness of figure and poetical- 
ness of diction were regarded as essentials of style. 

To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it cre- 
ated, at least in the field of prose style, one should read the two 
orations delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield. 
Here was the moment of transition between the old American lit- 
erature and the new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New Eng- 
land, correct, polished, fervid, massing perfect periods to a cli- 
max, scholarly, sonorous of diction, studied of movement, finished, 
left the platform after his long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the 
few who could judge of oratory as a finished work of art had 
been upon him and he had stood the test. Then had come for a 
single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of the people, 
retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art, voicing 
in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but 
from the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years 
later, the oration of Everett can be found only by reference 
librarians, while the message of Lincoln is declaimed by every 
school-boy. 

The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of na- 
tionalism and of populism, not in the narrower political mean- 
ings of these words, but in the generic sense. The older group 
of writers had been narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to 
Bridge shortly before the war: *'At present we have no coun- 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 15 

try. . . . The States are too various and too extended to form 
really one country. New England is really as large a lump of 
earth as my heart can take in. " ^ The war shook America awake, 
it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It 
was satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feel- 
ing. After the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded gen- 
uineness and the truth of life. A new spirit — social, dramatic, 
intense — took the place of the old dreaming and sentiment and 
sadness. The people had awakened. The intellectual life of 
the nation no longer was to be in the hands of the aristocratic, 
scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a bill had 
passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands for 
the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to 
promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial 
classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it 
is significant that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, 
signed the bill. 

IV 

The chief output of the new era was in the form of realistic 
fiction. America, shaken from narrow sectionalism and contem- 
plation of Europe, woke up and discovered America. In a kind 
of astonishment she wandered from section to section of her own 
land, discovering everywhere peoples and manners and languages 
that were as strange to her even as foreign lands. Mark Twain 
and Harte and Miller opened to view the wild regions and wilder 
society of early California and the Sierra Nevadas; Eggleston 
pictured the primitive settlements of Indiana; Cable told the 
romance of tlie Creoles and of the picturesque descendants of 
the Acadians on the bayous of Louisiana ; Page and Harris and 
F. H. Smith and others caught a vision of the romance of the old 
South ; Allen told of Kentucky life ; Miss French of the dwellers 
in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and Miss Murfree of a strange 
people in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. In twenty 
years every isolated neighborhood in America had had its chron- 
icler and photographer. 

The spirit of the New America was realistic. There had been 
dreaming and moonlight and mystery enough ; now it wanted 
concrete reality. "Give us the people as they actually are. 

9 Woodberry's Hawthorne, 281. 



16 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Give us their talk as they actually talk it," and the result was 
the age of dialect — dialect poetry, dialect fiction, dialect even to 
coarseness and profanity. The old school in the East stood 
aghast before what they termed this " Neo-Americanism, " this 
coarse "new literature of the people." Holland in 1872 found 
"Truthful James" "deadly wearisome." He hoped that the 
poet had ' ' found, as his readers have, sufficient amusement in the 
'Heathen Chinee' and the 'Society upon the Stanislaus' and is 
ready for more serious work." From this wearisome stuff he 
then turned to review in highest terms Stoddard's Book of the 
East, a land which Stoddard had never visited save in dreams. 

The reviewer of Maurice Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics four 
years later speaks of the author as a promising acquisition to 
"the invading Goths from over the mountains." Stedman 
viewed the new tide with depression of soul. In a letter to Taylor 
in 1873 he says : 

Lars is a poem that will last, though not in the wretched, immediate 
fashion of this demoralized American period. Cultured as are Hay 
and Harte, they are almost equally responsible with "Josh Billings" 
and the Danbury News man for the present horrible degeneracy of the 
public taste — that is, the taste of the present generation of book-buyers. 

I feel that this is not the complaint of a superannuated Roger de 
Coverley nor Colonel Neweome, for I am in the prime and vigor of 
active, noonday life, and at work right here in the metropolis. It is 
a clear-headed, wide-awake statement of a disgraceful fact. With it 
all I acknowledge, the demand for good books also increases and such 
works as Paine's Septembre, etc., have a large standard sale. But in 
poetry readers have tired of the past and don't see clearly how to shape 
a future; and so content themselves with going to some "Cave" or 
"Hole in the Wall" and applauding slang and nonsense, spiced with 
smut and profanity.^" 

This is an extreme statement of the conditions, but it was 
written by the most alert and clear-eyed critic of the period, one 
who, even while he deplored the conditions, was wise enough to 
recognize the strength of the movement and to ally himself with 
it. "Get hold of a dramatic American theme," he counsels 
Taylor, ' ' merely for policy 's sake. The people want Neo-Ameri- 
canism ; we must adopt their system and elevate it. ' ' Wise ad- 
vice indeed, but Taylor had his own ideals. After the failure 
of The Masque of the Gods he wrote Aldrich: "If this public 

10 Life and Letters of B. C. Stedman, i : 477. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 17 

won't accept my better work, I must wait till a new one grows 
up. ... I will go on trying to do intrinsically good things, and 
will not yield a hair's breadth for the sake of conciliating an 
ignorant public. ' ' ^^ 



The exploiting of new and strange regions, with their rough 
manners, their coarse humor, and their uncouth dialects, brought 
to the front the new, hard-fought, and hard-defended literary 
method called realism. For a generation the word was on every 
critic's pen both in America and abroad. No two seemed per- 
fectly to agree what the term really meant, or what writers were 
to be classed as realists and what as romanticists. It is becoming 
clearer now : it was simply the new, young, vigorous tide which 
had set in against the decadent, dreamy softness that had ruled 
the mid years of the century. 

The whole history of literature is but the story of an alter- 
nating current. A new, young school of innovators arises to 
declare the old forms lifeless and outworn. Wordsworth at the 
opening of the nineteenth century had protested against un- 
reality and false sentiment — *'a dressy literature, an exagger- 
ated literature" as Bagehot expressed it — and he started the 
romantic revolt by proposing in his poems "to choose incidents 
and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, 
throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really 
used by men. ' ' Revolt always has begun with the cry * ' back to 
nature"; it is always the work of young men who have no rev- 
erence for the long-standing and the conventional; and it is 
always looked upon with horror by the older generations. Jef- 
frey, in reviewing the Lyrical Ballads, said that the "Ode on 
Intimations of Immortality ' ' was ' ' beyond doubt the most illegi- 
ble and unintelligible part of the publication. AYe can pretend 
to give no analysis or explanation of it. ' ' At last the revolt tri- 
umphs, and as the years go on its ideas in turn are hardened 
into rules of art. Then suddenly another group of daring young 
souls arises, and, setting its back upon the old, blazes out a new 
pathway toward what it considers to be truth and nature and 
art. This new school of revolt from the old and outworn we 

=" lAfe and Letters of Bayard Taylor, ii : 588. 



18 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

call always the new romantic movement. It is only the new gen- 
eration pressing upon the old, and demanding a fresh statement 
of life in terms of truth to present conditions. 

In America, and indeed in Europe as well, the early seventies 
called for this new statement of art. No more Hyperions, no 
more conceits and mere prettinesses, no more fine phrasing, no 
more castles in Spain, but life real and true, naked in its abso- 
lute faithfulness to facts. It was a revolt. If we call the age of 
Longfellow a romantic period, then this revolt of the seventies 
was a new romanticism, for romanticism always in broadest sense 
is a revolution against orthodoxy, against the old which has 
been so long established that it has lost its first vitality and be- 
come an obedience to the letter rather than to the spirit. 

The new movement seemed to the Brahmins of the older school 
a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. Even Lowell, who had writ- 
ten the Biglow Papers, cried out against it. The new literature 
from the "West and the South was the work of what Holmes had 
called "the homespun class," "the great multitude." It was 
written, almost all of it, by authors from no college. They had 
been educated at the printer's case, on the farm, in the mines, 
and along the frontiers. As compared with the roll of the Brah- 
mins the list is significant: Wliitman, Warner, Helen Jackson, 
Stockton, Shaw, Clemens, Piatt, Thaxter, Howells, Eggleston, 
Burroughs, F. H. Smith, Hay, Harte, Miller, Cable, Gilder, Allen, 
Harris, Jewett, Wilkins, Murfree, Riley, Page, Russell. The 
whole school thrilled with the new life of America, and they wrote 
often without models save as they took life itself as their model. 
Coarse and uncouth some parts of their work might be, but teem- 
ing it always was with the freshness, the vitality, and the vigor of 
a new soil and a newly awakened nation. 

VI 

The new period began in the early seventies. The years of 
the war and the years immediately following it were fallow so 
far as significant literary output was concerned. "Literature 
is at a standstill in America, paralyzed by the Civil "War," wrote 
Stedman in 1864, and at a later time he added, "For ten years 
the new generation read nothing but newspapers." The old 
group was still producing voluminously, but their work was done. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 19 

They had been borne into an era in which they could have no 
part, and they contented themselves with reeehoings of the old 
music and with translations. In 1871 The London School Board 
Chronicle could declare that, "The most gifted of American 
singers are not great as creators of home-bred poetry, but as 
translators," and then add without reservation that the best 
translations in the English language had been made in America. 
It was the statement of a literal fact. Within a single period of 
six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellow's Di- 
vina Commedia, C. E. Norton's Vita Nuova, T. W. Parsons' 7/i- 
ferno, Bryant's Iliad and Odyssey, Taylor's Faust and C. P. 
Cranch's jEneid. 

It was the period of swan songs. Emerson's Terminus came 
in 1866; Last Poems of the Gary sisters, Longfellow's Aftermath 
and Whittier's Hazel Blossoms appeared in 1874; and Holmes's 
The Iron Gate was published in 1880. Lowell, the youngest of 
the group, alone seemed to have been awakened by the war. 
His real message to America, the national odes and the essays 
on Democracy which will make his name permanent in literature, 
came after 1865, and so falls into the new period. 

The decade from 1868 is in every respect the most vital and 
significant one in the history of America. The tremendous 
strides which were then made in the settlement of the West, the 
enormous increase of railroads and steamships and telegraphs, 
the organization of nation-wide corporations like those dealing 
with petroleum and steel and coal — all these we have already 
mentioned. America had thrown aside its provincialism and had 
become a great neighborhood, and in 1876 North, South, East, 
and West gathered in a great family jubilee. Scribner's Monthly 
in 1875 commented feelingly upon the fact : 

All the West is coming East. . . . The Southeni States will be simi- 
larly moved. . . . There will be a tremendous shakhag up of the people, 
a great going to and fro in the land. . . . The nation is to be brought 
together as it has never been brought before dui-ing its history. In one 
hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we have 
been so busy that we never have been able to look one another in the 
face, except four terrible years of Civil War. . . . This year around 
the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to meet and embrace as 
brothers.^ - 

12 Scrihner's Monthly, xi : 432. 



20 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The Centennial quickened in every way the national life. It 
gave for the first time the feeling of unity, the realization that 
the vast West, the new South, and the uncouth frontier were a 
vital part of the family of the States. Lowell, so much of whose 
early heart and soul had been given to Europe, discovered Amer- 
ica in this same Centennial year. In Cincinnati he was pro- 
foundly impressed with the "wonderful richness and comfort 
of the country and with the distinctive Americanism that is 
molding into one type of feature and habits so many races that 
had widely diverged from the same original stock, . , . These 
immense spaces tremulous with the young grain, trophies of 
individual, or at any rate unorganized, courage and energy, of 
the people and not of dynasties, were to me inexpressibly im- 
pressive and even touching. . . . The men who have done and 
are doing these things know how things should be done. ... It 
was very interesting, also, to meet men from Kansas and Nevada 
and California, and to see how manly and intelligent they were, 
and especially what large heads they had. They had not the 
manners of Vere de Vere, perhaps, but they had an independence 
and self-respect which are the prime element of fine bearing. ' ' ^* 
A little of a certain Brahmin condescension toward Westerners 
there may be here, but on the whole it rings true. The East 
was discovering the West and was respecting it. 

And now all of a sudden this Neo- Americanism burst forth into 
literature. There is a similarity almost startling between the 
thirties that saw the outburst of the mid-century school and the 
vital seventies that arose in reaction against it. The first era 
had started with Emerson's glorification of the American scholar, 
the second had glorified the man of action. The earlier period 
was speculative, sermonic, dithyrambic, eloquent ; the new Amer- 
ica which now arose was cold, dispassionate, scientific, tolerant. 
Both had arisen in storm and doubt and in protest against the 
old. Both touched the people, the earlier era through the senti- 
ments, the later through the analytical and the dramatic facul- 
ties. In the thirties had arisen Godey's Lady's Book; in the 
seventies Scribner's Monthly. 

So far as literature was concerned the era may be said really 
to have commenced in 1869 with Innocents Abroad, the first book 
from which there breathed the new wild spirit of revolt. In 

'Norton's Letters of James Russell Loicell, ii: 169. 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 21 

1870 came Harte 's Luck of Roaring Camp, thrilling with the new 
strange life of the gold coast and the Sierra Nevada, and War- 
ner's My Summer in a Garden, a transition book fresh and de- 
lightful. Then in 1871 had begun the deluge: Burroughs 's 
Wake-Rohin, with its new gospel of nature; Eggleston's Hoosier 
Schoolmaster, fresh with uncouth humor and the strangeness of 
the frontier; Harte 's East and West Poems; Hay's Pike County 
Ballads, crude poems from the heart of the people; Howells's 
first novel, Tlieir Wedding Journey, a careful analysis of actual 
social conditions; Miller's Songs of the Sierras; Carleton's Poems; 
King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a book of travel 
glorifying not Europe but a picturesque section of America ; and 
the completed version of Leland's Hans Breitmann's Ballads, a 
book which had waited fourteen years for a publisher who had 
the courage to bring it out. In 1873 came Celia Thaxter's 
Poems, Aldrich's Majorie Daw, H. H.'s Saxe Holm Stories, Wal- 
lace's Fair God and O'Reilly's Songs of the Southern Seas; in 
1875 James's Passionate Pilgrim, Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics, 
Gilder's The New Day, Lanier's Poems, Catherwood's A Woman 
in Armor, Woolson's Castle Nowhere and Irwin Russell's first 
poem in Scrihner's; in 1877 Burnett's That Lass o' Lowrie's and 
•Jewett's Deephaven; in 1878 Craddock's The Dancing Party at 
Harrison's Cove in the Atlantic Monthly, Richard ]\I. Johnston's 
Life of Stephens; in 1879 Cable's Old Creole Days, Tourgee's 
Figs and Thistles, Stockton's Rudder Grange, and John Muir's 
Studies in the Sierras, in Scrihner's. All the elements of the 
new era had appeared before 1880. 

The old traditions were breaking. In 1874 the editorial chair 
of the Atlantic Monthly, the exclusive organ of the old New 
England regime, was given to a Westerner. In 1873 came the 
resurgence of Whitman. The earlier school had ignored him, 
or had tolerated him because of Emerson, but now with the new 
discovery of America he also was discovered, and hailed as a 
pioneer. The new school of revolt in England — Rossetti, Swin- 
burne, Syraonds — declared him a real voice, free and individual, 
the voice of all the people. Thoreau also came into his true place. 
His own generation had misunderstood him, compared liim with 
Emerson, and neglected him. Only two of his books had been 
published during his lifetime and one of these had sold fewer than 
three hundred copies. Now he too was discovered. In the words 



22 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

of Burroughs, ''His fame has increased steadily since his death 
in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little more than in the 
bud at that time, and its full leaf and flowering are not yet." 



VII 

The new age was to express itself in prose. The poetry of the 
earlier period, soft and lilting and romantic, no longer satisfied. 
It was effeminate in tone and subject, and the new West, virile 
and awake, defined a poet, as Wordsworth had defined him in 
1815, as "a man speaking to men." America, in the sturdy 
vigor of manhood, wrestling with fierce realities, had passed the 
age of dreaming. It had now to deal with social problems, with 
plans on a vast scale for the bettering of human conditions, with 
the organization of cities and schools and systems of government. 
It was a busy, headlong, multitudinous age. Poetry, to interest 
it, must be sharp and incisive and winged with a message. It 
must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it must ring true. 
If it deal with social themes it must be perfect in characteriza- 
tion and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs of 
Riley and Drummond, or the vers de societe of Bunner and 
Eugene Field. If it touch national themes, it must be strong 
and trumpet clear, like the odes of Lowell and Lanier. It must 
not spring from the far off and the forgot but from the life of 
the day and the hour, as sprung Whitman's Lincoln elegies, 
Joaquin Miller's "Columbus," and Stedman's war lyrics. Not 
many have there been who have brought message and thrill, but 
there have been enough to save the age from the taunt that it-~- 
was a period without poets. 

In a broad sense, no age has ever had more of poetry, for the 
message and the vision and thrill, which in older times came 
through epic and lyric and drama, have in the latter days come 
in full measure through the prose form which we call the novel. 
As a form it has been brought to highest perfection. It has been 
found to have scope enough to exercise the highest powers of a 
great poet, and allow him to sound all the depths and shallows 
of human life. It has been the preacher of the age, the theater, 
the minstrel, and the social student, the prophet and seer and 
reformer. It has been more than the epic of democracy ; it has 
been horn-book as well and shepherd's calendar. It has been 



THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 23 

the literary form peculiarly fitted for a restless, observant, sci- 
entific age. 

The infiuence of Dickens, who died in 1870, the opening year 
of the period, cannot be lightly passed over. It had been his 
task in the middle years of the century to democratise literature, 
and to create a reading public as Addison had done a century 
earlier, but Addison 's public was London, the London that break- 
fasted late and went to the coffee house. Dickens created a read- 
ing public out of those who had never reacTBooks before, and the 
greater part of it was in America. His social novels with their 
break from all the conventions of fiction, their bold, free charac- 
terization, their dialect and their rollicking humor and their 
plentiful sentiment, were peculiarly fitted for appreciation in 
the new after-the-war atmosphere of the new land. Harte freely 
acknowledged his debt to him and at his death laid a "spray of 
Western pine" on his grave. The grotesque characters of the 
Dickens novels were not more grotesque than the actual inhabit- 
ants of the wild mining towns of the Sierras or the isolated 
mountain hamlets of the South, or of many out-of-the-way dis- 
tricts even in New England. The great revival of interest in 
Dickens brought about by his death precipitated the first wave 
of local color novels — the earliest work of Harte and Eggleston 
and Stockton and the author of Cape Cod Folks. 

This first wave of Dickens-inspired work, however, soon ex- 
pended itself, and it was followed by another wave of fiction even 
more significant. In the first process of rediscovering America, 
Harte, perhaps, or Clemens, or Cable, stumbled upon a tremen- 
dous fact which was destined to add real classics to American lit- 
erature : America was full of border lands where the old regime 
had yielded to the new, and where indeed there was a true at- 
mosphere of romance. The result was a type of fiction that was 
neither romantic nor realistic, but a blending of both methods, 
a romanticism of atmosphere and a realism of truth to the actual 
conditions and characters involved. 

This condition worked itself out in a literary form that is seen 
now to be the most distinctive product of the period. The era 
may as truly be called the era of the short story as the Elizabethan 
period may be called the era of the drama and the early eighteenth 
century the era of the prose essay. The local color school which 
exploited the new-found nooks and corners of the AVest and 



24 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

South did its work almost wholly by means of this highly wrought 
and concentrated literary form. Not half a dozen novelists of 
the period have worked exclusively in the novel and romance 
forms of the mid-century type. A group of writers, including 
Harte, Clemens, Cable, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Wilkins- 
Freeman, Miss Brown, Miss Murfree, Harris, R. M. Johnston, 
Page, Stockton, Bierce, Garland, Miss King, Miss French, Miss 
"Woolson, Deming, Bunner, Aldrich, have together created what 
is perhaps the best body of short stories in any language. 

The period at its end tended to become journalistic. The enor- 
mous demand for fiction by the magazines and by the more 
ephemeral journals produced a gi-eat mass of hastily written and 
often ill considered work, but on the whole the literary quality 
of the fiction of the whole period, especially the short stories, has 
been high. Never has there been in any era so vast a flood of 
books and reading, and it may also be said that never before has 
there been so high an average of literary workmanship. 



CHAPTER II 

THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 

American literature from the first has been rich in humor. 
The incongruities of the new world — the picturesque gathering 
of peoples like the Puritans, the Indians, the cavaliers, the Dutch, 
the negroes and the later immigrants ; the makeshifts of the fron- 
tier, the vastness and the richness of the land, the leveling effects 
of democracy, the freedom of life, and the independence of spirit 
— all have tended to produce a laughing people. The first really 
American book, Irving 's Enickerhocker's History of New York, 
was a broadly humorous production. The mid period of the 
nineteenth century was remarkably rich in humor. One has only 
to mention Paulding and Holmes and Saxe and Lowell and Seba 
Smith and B. P. Shillaber. Yet despite these names and dozens 
of others almost equally deserving, it must be acknowledged that 
until the Civil War period opened there had been no school of 
distinctly American humorists, original and nation-wide. The 
production had been sporadic and provincial, and it had been read 
by small circles. The most of it could be traced to older proto- 
types : Hood, Thackeray, Lamb, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens. The 
humor of America, "new birth of our new soil," had been dis- 
covered, but as yet it had had no national recognition and no 
great representative. 

As late as 1866, a reviewer of "Artemus Ward" in the North 
American Review, published then in Boston, complained that 
humor in America had been a local product and that it had been 
largely imitative. It was time, he declared, for a new school of 
humorists who should be original in their methods and national 
in their scope. "They must not aim at copying anything; they 
shenld take a new form. . . . Let them seek to embody the wit 
and humor of all parts of the country, not only of one city where 
their paper is published ; let them force Portland to disgorge 
her Jack Downings and New York her Orpheus G Kerrs, for the 

25 



26 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

benefit of all. Let them form a nucleus which will draw to 
itself all the waggery and wit of America."^ It was the call 
of the new national spirit, and as if in reply there arose the new 
school — uncolleged for the most part, untrained by books, fresh, 
joyous, extravagant in its bursting young life — the first voice of 
the new era. 

The group was born during the thirties and early forties, that 
second seedtime of American literature. Their birth dates fall 
within a period of ten years : 

1833. David Ross Locke, "Petroleum V, Nasby." 

1834. Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward." 

1834. Charles Henry Webb, "John Paul." 

1835. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain." 

1836. Robert Henry Newell, "Orpheus C. Kerr." 
1839. Melvin DeLancy Landon, "Eli Perkins." 
1841. Thomas Nast. 

1841. Charles Heber Clark, "Max Adler." 

1841. James Montgomery Bailey, ' ' The Danbury News Man. ' ' 

1841. Alexander Edwin Sweet. 

1842. Charles Bertrand Lewis, "M. Quad." 

To the school also belonged several who were bom outside of 
this magic ten years. There were Henry Wheeler Shaw, "Josh 
Billings," born in 1818; and Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp," 
born in 1823. At least three younger members must not be omit- 
ted: Robert Jones Burdette, 1844; Edgar Wilson Nye, "Bill 
Nye," 1850; and Opie Read, 1852. 



In a broad way the school was a product of the Civil War. 
American humor had been an evolution of slow growth, and the 
war precipitated it. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the 
beginning. Here was a man of the new West who had worked 
on flatboats on the Ohio, who had served as a soldier in a back- 
woods troop, who had ridden for years on a Western circuit, and 
in rough and ready political campaigns had Mdthstood the heck- 
ling of men who had fought barehanded with the frontier and 
had won. The saddest man in American history, he stands as 

1 Vol. 102:586. 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 27 

one of the greatest of American humorists. His laughter rings 
through the whole period of the war, man of sorrows though he 
was, and it was the Western laughter heard until now only along 
the great rivers and the frontier and the gold coast of the Pacific. 
He had learned it from contact with elemental men, men who 
passed for precisely what they were, men who were measured 
solely by the iron rule of what they could do; self-reliant men, 
healthy, huge-bodied, deep-lunged men to whom life was a joy. 
The humor that he brought to the East was nothing new in Amer- 
ica, but the significant thing is that for the first time it was placed 
in the limelight. A peculiar combination it was, half shrewd 
wisdom, "hoss sense," as ''Josh Billings" called it, the rest 
characterization which exposed as with a knife-cut the inner life 
as well as the outer, whimsical overstatement and understatement, 
droll incongruities told with all seriousness, and an irreverence 
born of the all-leveling democracy of the frontier. 

*'It was Lincoln's opinion that the finest wit and humor, 
the best jokes and anecdotes, emanated from the lower orders of 
the country people,"^ and in this judgment he pointed out the 
very heart of the new literature that was germinating about him. 
Such life is genuine; it rests upon the foundations of nature 
itself. Lincoln, like the man of the new West that he was, de- 
lighted not so much in books as in actual contact with life. 
"Riding the circuit for many years and stopping at country 
taverns where were gathered the lawyers, jurymen, witnesses, 
and clients, they would sit up all night narrating to each other 
their life adventures; and the things which happened to an 
original people, in a new country, surrounded by novel conditions, 
and told with the descriptive power and exaggeration which 
characterized such men, supplied him with an exhaustless fund 
of anecdotes which could be made applicable for enforcing or 
refuting an argument better than all the invented stories of the 
world. "3 

It was the new humor of the West for the first time shown to 
the whole world. Lincoln, the man of the West, had met the 
polished East in the person of Douglas and had triumphed 
through very genuineness, and now he stood in the limelight 
of the Presidency, transacting the nation's business with anec- 

sLamon's Life of Abraham Lincoln, 480. 

sChaimcey M. Depew, quoted in Hapgood's Abraham Lincoln, 118. 



28 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

dotes from the frontier circuits, meeting hostile critics with 
shrewd border philosophy, and reading aloud with unction, while 
battles were raging or election returns were in doubt, from 
"Artemus Ward," or "Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby," or The 
Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi — favorites of his be- 
cause they too were genuine, excerpts not from books but from 
life itself. 

II 

Glimpses there already had been of the new humor of the 
West. George AV. Harris (1814-1868), steamboat captain on 
the Tennessee River, had created that true child of the West, 
"Sut Lovengood"; Augustus B. Longstreet (1790-1870) in 
Georgia Scenes had drawn inimitable sketches of the rude life of 
his region; and Joseph G. Baldwin (1815-1864), like Lincoln, 
himself a lawyer who had learned much on his frontier circuit, 
in his Flush Times had traced the evolution of a country barris- 
ter in a manner that even now, despite its echoes of Dickens, 
makes the book a notable one. 

But the greatest of them all, the real father of the new school 
of humorists, the man who gave the East the first glimpse of the 
California type of humor, was George Horatio Derby (1823- 
1861), whose sketches over the signature ''John Phoenix" began 
to appear in the early fifties. Undoubtedly it would amaze 
Derby could he return and read of himself as the father of the 
later school of humor. With him literary comedy was simply a 
means now and then of relaxation from the burdens of a strenu- 
ous profession. He had been graduated from West Point in 
1846, had fought in the Mexican War, and later as an engineer 
had been entrusted by the government with important surveys 
and explorations in the far West and later in Florida, where he 
died at the age of thirty-eight of sunstroke. He was burdened 
all his life with heavy responsibilities and exacting demands 
upon his energies. He had little time for books, and his writings, 
what few he produced, were the result wholly of his own observa- 
tions upon the picturesque life that he found about him in the 
West. 

In nis Phoenixiana, published in 1855, we find nearly all of the 
elements that were to be used by the new school of humorists. 
First, there is the solemn protestation of truthfulness followed 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 29 

by the story that on the face of it is impossible. *'If the son 
of the reader . . . should look confidingly into his parent's face, 
and inquire — 'Is that true, Papa?' reply, oh, reader, unhesi- 
tatingly — 'My son, it is.' " To make the story still more plaus- 
ible he quotes ' ' Truthful James. ' ' He may then proceed with a 
story like this : 

He glanced over the first column [of Phoenix's Pictorial] when he 
was observed to grow black in the face. A bystander hastened to seize 
him by the collar, but it was too late. Exploding with mirth, he was 
scattered into a thousand fragments, one of which striking him prob- 
ably inflicting some fatal injury, as he immediately expii-ed, having 
barely time to remove his hat, and say in a feeble voice, "Give this to 
Phoenix." A large black tooth lies on the table before us, driven 
through the side of the office with fearful violence at the time of the 
explosion. We have enclosed it to his widow with a letter of con- 
dolence. 

^'Truthful James" — we think of Bret Harte, and we think of 
him again after passages like this : ' ' An old villain with a bald 
head and spectacles punched me in the abdomen; I lost my 
breath, closed my eyes, and remembered nothing further." 

Derby was the first conspicuous writer to use gi'otesque ex- 
aggerations deliberately and freely as a provocative of laughter. 
Irving and many others had made use of it, but in PhoBUixiana 
it amounts to a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing im- 
possibilities and then naively adds : " It is possible that the cir- 
cumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, 
there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents." In 
true California style he makes use often of specific exaggera- 
tion. Two men trip over a rope in the dark "and then followed 
what, if published, would make two closely printed royal octavo 
pages of profanity." So popular was the Phoenix Herald that 
"we have now seven hundred and eighty-two Indians employed 
night and day in mixing adobe for the type molds." 

The second characteristic of Derby 's humor was its irreverence. 
To him nothing was sacred. The first practical joker, he averred, 
was Judas Iscariot : he sold his Master. Arcturus, he observed, 
was a star "which many years since a person named Job was 
asked if he could guide, and he acknowledged he could n't do it." 
"David was a Jew — hence, the 'Harp of David' was a Jew's- 
harp." 



30 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so 
freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he 
explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western 
New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the 
bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such 
precipitation in fact that ' ' he took nothing with him of his large 
property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about 
him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended 
his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had 
been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which 
fall he unfortunately broke his neck." 

He abounds in true Yankee aphorisms — "when a man is going 
down, everybody lends him a kick," "Where impudence is wit, 
't is folly to reply." He uses unexpected comparisons and whim- 
sical non sequiturs: he sails on "a Napa steam packet of four 
cat-power"; "the wind blew," he declared, "like well-watered 
roses." R. W. Emerson, he was informed, while traveling 
in upper Norway, "on the 21st of June, 1836, distinctly saw the 
sun in all its majesty shining at midnight! — in fact, all night. 
Emerson is not what you would call a superstitious man, by any 
means — but, he left." 

It was Derby who wrote the first Pike County ballad. ' ' Sud- 
denly we hear approaching a train from Pike County, consisting 
of seven families, with forty-six wagons, each drawn by thirteen 
oxen." Elsewhere he has described the typical "Pike": "His 
hair is light, not a 'sable silvered,' but a yeller, gilded; you can 
see some of it sticking out of the top of his hat; his costume is 
the national costume of Arkansas, coat, waistcoat, and panta- 
loons of. homespun cloth, dyed a brownish yellow, with a decoc- 
tion of the bitter barked butternut — a pleasing alliteration; his 
countenance presents a determined, combined with a sanctimoni- 
ous expression." "Now rises o'er the plains in mellifluous ac- 
cents, the grand Pike County Chorus : 

Oh, we '11 soon be thar 
In the land of gold, 
Through the forest old, 
O'er the mounting cold, 
With spirits bold — 
Oh, we come, we come. 
And we '11 soon be thar. 

Gee up, Bolly! whoo, up, whoo haw! 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 31 

Not much was added to Western humor after Derby. j\Iark 
Twain's earliest manner had much in it that smacks of "Ph(e- 
nix. " The chapters entitled, "Phoenix Takes an AtTfectionate 
Leave of San l"'rancisco, " "Phoenix is on the Sea," and "Phoe- 
nix in San Diego" might have been taken from Roughing It. 
Just as truly the chapters, ' ' Inauguration of the New Collector ' ' 
and "Return of the Collector," "Thrilling and Frantic Excite- 
ment Among Office Seekers" might have been written by Or- 
pheus C. Kerr. Yet despite such similarities, the later school did 
not necessarily filch from ' ' Phoenix ' ' : they learned their art as 
he had learned it from contact with the new West. All drew 
from the same model. 

Ill 

For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the 
new period in American literature, was Western humor of the 
**John Phoenix" type. It came from three great seed places: 
the Mississippi and its rivers, the California coast, and, later, 
the camps of the Civil War. It was the humor of the gatherings 
of men under primitive conditions. It was often crude and 
coarse. It was elemental and boisterous and often profane. To 
the older school of poets and scholars in the East it seemed, as it 
began to fill all the papers and creep even into the standard 
magazines, like a veritable renaissance of vulgarity, "The 
worlds before and after the Deluge were not more different than 
our republics of letters before and after the war,"^ wrote Sted- 
man to William Winter in 1873, and the same year he wrote to 
Taylor in Europe, "The whole country, owing to contagion 
of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, del- 
uged, swamped, beneath a mudd}' tide of slang, vulgarity, 'inartis- 
tic bathers [sic], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit." "* 

Many of the new humorists had been born in the East, but all of 
them had been drilled either in the rough school of the West or 
in the armies during the war. Shaw had been a deckhand on 
an Ohio River steamer ; Browne had been a tramp printer both 
in the East and the AVest, and had lived for a time in California ; 
Clemens had been tramp printer, pilot on the Mississippi, and 
for five years miner and newspaper man on the Western coast; 

^Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman, i: 466. 
6/6td., i: 477. 



32 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Webb and Nye and Newell had seen life in California; Locke 
had edited country papers in northern Ohio, and C. H. Smith, 
Landon, Bailey, Sweet, Lewis, and Burdette had been soldiers 
in the Civil War. All of them had been thrown together with 
men under circumstances that had stripped them and the life 
about them of all the veneer of convention and class distinction. 

One thing the group had in common: they were newspaper 
men; most of them had worked at the case; all of them at one 
time or another were connected with the press. The new humor 
was scattered by the newspapers that after the war spread them- 
selves in incredible numbers over America. The exchange sys- 
tem, complained of by Stedman, became nation wide. The good 
things of one paper were seized upon by the others and sown 
broadcast. Humorous departments became more and more com- 
mon, until staid old papers like the Boston Advertiser had yielded 
to the popular demand. The alarm voiced by Stedman in his 
letter to Taylor was taken up by the more conservative maga- 
zines. The humor of to-day is written for the multitude, com- 
plained the ponderous old North American Review, ''that un- 
counted host which reads for its romance The Ledger and The 
Pirate of the Gulf. Common schools make us a nation of read- 
ers. But common schools, alas! do little to inculcate taste or 
discrimination in the choice of reading. The mass of the com- 
munity has a coarse digestion. ... It likes horse-laughs. ' ' ® But 
it is useless to combat the spirit of the age. 

The wave rolled on until it reached its height in the mid sev- 
enties. From journals with an incidental humorous column 
there had arisen the newspaper that was quoted everywhere and 
enormously subscribed for solely because of the funny man in 
charge. The Danhury News, the local paper of a small Connecti;;, 
cut city, swelled its subscription list to 40,000 because of its 
editor Bailey. The vogue of such a paper was not long. At 
different periods there arose and flourished and declined "Nas- 
by 's" Toledo Blade, " Lickshingle 's " Oil City Derrick, Burdette 's 
Burlington Hawkey e, "M. Quad's" Detroit Free Press, Peck's 
Sun, Sweet's Texas Sif tings. Read's Arkansaw Traveller, and 
many others. 

The greater part of this newspaper humor was as fleeting as 
the flying leaves upon which it was printed. It has disappeared 

«Vol. 102:588. 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 33 

never to be regathered. Even the small proportion of it that 
was put by its authors into book form has fared little better. 
From all the host of literary comedians that so shook the period 
with laughter not over four have taken anything even approach- 
ing a permanent place. These four are Browne, Locke, Nast, 
and Shaw. 

IV 

Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward," the first of the 
group to gain recognition, was born of Puritan ancestry in 
Waterville, Maine, in 1834. Forced by the death of his father 
in 1847 to rely upon his own efforts for support, he became a 
typesetter on the Skowhegan Clarion, and later, after a wander- 
ing career from office to office, served for three years in Boston 
as a compositor for Snow and Wilder, the publishers of Mrs. 
Partington's Carpet Bag. His connection with Shillaber, the 
editor of this paper, turned his mind to humorous composition, 
but it was not until after his second wander period in the South 
and West that he discovered the real bent of his powers. His 
career as a humorist may be said to have begun in 1857, when, 
after two years at Toledo, Ohio, he was called to the local editor- 
ship of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and given freedom to inject 
into the dry news columns all the life and fun that he chose. 
He began now to write articles purporting to describe the strug- 
gles and experiences of one ' ' Artemus Ward, ' ' an itinerant show- 
man who was as full of homely wisdom and experience as he was 
lacking in book learning and refinement. The letters instantly 
struck a popular chord ; they were copied widely. After serving 
three years on the Plain-Dealer their author was called to New 
York to become the editor of the brilliant but ill-starred comic 
magazine. Vanity Fair. The following year, 1861, he began 
to lecture, and in 1863 and 1864 ne made a six-months' lecture 
tour of the Pacific Coast. The free, picturesque life of the new 
cities and the wild camps delighted him. In Virginia City he 
spent three marvelous weeks with Mark Twain, then a reporter 
on the local paper. Returning across the Plains, he visited the 
Mormons. The trip was the graduate course of the young hu- 
morist. Not until after his California training was he completely 
in command of his art. Then in 1866 at the height of his powers 
he went to London, where his success was instant and unprece- 



34 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

dented. He was made an editor of Punch, he was discussed 
in all quarters, and his lectures night by night were attended by 
crowds. But the end was near. He died of quick consumption 
March 6, 1867. 

The secret of Browne's success as a humorist lay, first of all, 
in the droll personality of the man. It was the opinion of 
Haweis, who heard him in London, that his "bursts of quaint 
humor could only live at all in that subtle atmosphere which 
Artemus Ward's presence created, and in which alone he was 
able to operate. " ^ He made use of all the humorous devices of 
his favorite, John Phcenix, and to them he added what may be 
called the American manner of delivering humor: the setting 
forth with perfect gravity and even mournfulness his most telling 
jokes and then the assuming of a surprised or even a grieved ex- 
pression when the audience laughed. 

Furthermore, to Phoenix's devices he added cacography, the 
device of deliberate misspelling so much used by later humorists. 
He seems to have adopted it spontaneously as a matter of course. 
He was to take the character of an ignorant showman and nat- 
urally he must write as such a man would write. The misspell- 
ing of "Artemus Ward" has character in it. In his hands it 
becomes an art, and an art that helps make vivid the personality 
of the old showman. "Artemus Ward" is not a mere Dickens 
gargoyle: he is alive. Witness this: 

If you say anything about my show say my snaiks is as harmliss 
as the new born Babe. 

In the Brite Lexington of yooth, thar aint no sich word as fale. 
"Too troo, too troo !" I answered ; "it 's a scanderlis fact." 

He is not at all consistent in his spelling; he is as prodigal as 
nature and as careless. The mere uninspired cacographist mis- 
spells every word that it is possible to misspell, but Browne picks 
only key words. His art is displayed as much in the words he 
does not change as in those with which he makes free. He coins 
new words with telling effect. Of his wife he observes: "As 
a flap-jackist she has no equal. She wears the belt." And he 
makes free with older words in a way that is peculiarly his own : 
"Why this thusness." 

The third element he added to the humor of Phoenix was a 

7 Haweis's American Humorists, 122. 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 35 

jQaive drollery, a whimsical incongruity, that was peculiar to 
himself. He caught it from no one, and he imparted it to no 
one. It can be described only as "Artemus Ward." It lives 
even apart from his presence in much of the writing that he has 
left behind him. It is as useless to try to analyze it as it were 
to describe the odor of apples. One can only quote examples, as 
for instance this from his adventure "Among the Free Lovers":^ 

The exsentric female then clutched me frantically by the arm and 
hollered : 

"You air mine, you air mine !" 

"Scacely," I sed, endeverin to git loose from her. But she clung to 
me and sed: 

"You air my Affinerty!" 

"What upon arth is thatf I shouted. 

"Dost thou not know?" 

"No, I dostent !" 

"Listin man & I '11 tell ye !" sed the strange female ; "for years I hav 
yearned for thee. I knowd thou wast in the world sumwhares, tho I 
did n't know whare. My hart sed he would cum and I took courage. 
He has cum — he 's here — you air him — you air my Affinerty ! 't is 
too mutch ! too mutch !" and she sobbed agin. 

"Yes," I anserd, "I think it is a dam sight too mutch !" 

"Hast thou not yearned for mef she yelled, ringin her hands like 
a female play acter. 

"Not a yearn!" I bellerd at the top of my voice, throwin her away 
from me. 

Whatever we may think of the quality of this, we must agree 
that it is original. If there is any trace of a prototype it is 
Dickens. The characters and the situation are heightened to 
grotesqueness, yet one must be abnormally keen in palate to 
detect any Dickens flavor in the style. It is "Artemus Ward" 
and only "Artemus Ward." All that he wrote he drew from 
life itself and from American life. It is as redolent of the new 
world as the bison or the Indian. He wrote only what had passed 
under his eye and he wrote only of persons. Unlike Mark 
Twain, he could cross the continent in the wild days of '64 and 
see nothing apparently but humanity. 

The world of Charles Farrar Browne was the child's world 
of wonder. He was a case, as it were, of arrested development, a 
fragment of the myth-making age brought into the nineteenth 
century. His "Artemus Ward" was a latter-day knight-errant 
traveling from adventure to adventure. The world to him, 



36 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

even as to a child, was full of strange, half mythical beings: 
Shakers, Spiritualists, Octoroons, Free Lovers, Mormons, Cham- 
pions of Woman's Rights, Office Seekers, "Seseshers," Princes, 
and heirs to Empires. The hero is tempted, imposed upon, as- 
saulted, but he always comes out first best and turns with copious 
advice which is always moral and sensible and appropriate. To 
the woman who had claimed him as her affinity he speaks thus : 

I 'm a lawabiding man, and bleeve in good, old-fashioned institutions. 
1 am marrid & my orfsprings resemble me, if I am a showman ! I 
think your Affinity bizniss is cussed noneents, besides bein oulrajusly 
wicked. Why don't you behave desunt like other folks? Go to work 
and earn a honist livin and not stay round here in this lazy, shiftless 
way, pizenin the moral atmosphere with your pestifrous idees! You 
wimin folks go back to your lawful husbands, if you 've got any, and 
take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful 
like other wimin. You men folks, cut orf them pirattercal wiskers, 
burn up them infurnel pamplits, put sum weskuts on, go to work 
choppin wooa, splittin fence rales, or tillin the sile. I pored 4th. my 
indignashmi in this way till I got out of breth, when I stopt. 

This is not "Artemus "Ward" talking; it is Charles Farrar 
Browne, and it is Browne who rebukes the Shakers, the Spirit- 
ualists, the Committee from the Woman's Rights Association, 
and the office-seekers about Lincoln, who gives advice to the 
Prince of Wales and Prince Napoleon, who stands by the flag 
when the mob destroys his show down among the * ' Seseshers, ' ' 
and who later addresses the draft rioters at Baldwinsville. 
Browne was indeed a moral showman. Every page of his work 
is free from profanity and vulgarity. He is never cheap, never 
tawdry, never unkind to anything save immorality and snobbish- 
ness. His New England ancestry and breeding may be felt in 
all he wrote. At heart he was a reformer. He once wrote : 
"Humorous writers have always done the most toward helping 
virtue on its pilgrimage, and the truth has found more aid 
from them than from all the grave polemists and solid writers 
that have ever spoken or wi-itten." 

Beneath his kindly, whimsical exterior there was a spirit that 
could be blown into an indignation as fierce even as Mark Twain 's. 
While he was local editor of the Plain-Dealer he burst out one 
day in this fiery editorial : 

A writer in the Philadelphia Ledger has discovered that Edgar A. 
Poe was not a man of genius. We take it for granted that the writer 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 37 

has never read Poe. His lot in life was hard enough, God knows, and 
it is a pity the oyster-house critics, snobs, flunkeys, and literary nincom- 
poops can't stop snarling over his grave. The Ijiography of Poe by 
Griswold — which production for fiendish malignity is probably un- 
equaled in the history of letters — should, it would seem, have sufficed. 
No stone marks the spot where poor Poe sleeps, and no friendly hand 
strews flowers upon his grave in summer-time, but countless thousands, 
all over the world, will read and admire his wildly beautiful pages until 
the end of time.^ 

This knightly spirit led him to warfare upon everything that 
was merely sentimental or insincere. He burlesqued the gushing 
love songs of the period, advertising in his program to render 
at appropriate intervals "Dearest, Whenest Thou Slumberest 
Dostest Thou Dreamest of Me?" and "Dear Mother, I 've Come 
Home to Die by Request." He burlesqued the sensational novels 
of the day in Roberto, the Bover, and Moses, the Sassy. Only 
once did he ever read the Ledger, he avers, and that was after 
his first experience with New England rum : 

On takin the seeund glass I was seezed with a desire to break winders, 
& arter imbibin the third glass I knockt a small boy down, pickt his 
pocket of a New York Ledger, and wildly commenced readin Sylvanua 
Kobb's last Tail. 

He is still read and still republished. There is a perennial 
charm about his work that raises it above the times that produced 
it, and that promises to make it permanent. His originality, his 
unfailing animal spirits which came of the abounding life of the 
new America, his quaint characterization which has added a new 
figure to the gallery of fiction, his Americanism, his vein of kindli- 
ness and pathos that underlies all that he wrote, his indignation 
at snobbery and all in the life of his day that was not genuine 
and pure, and finally the exquisite pathos of his later years, all 
combine to make him remembered. 



Among the literary progeny of "Artemus "Ward" the most 
noteworthy, perhaps, was "Petroleum V. Nasby," who became so 
familiar a figure during the war. The creator of this unique 
character was David Ross Locke, a native of the State of New 

8 Quoted by Ruthrauff in "Ai'temus Ward at Cleveland," Scribner's 
Monthly, 16:784. 



38 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

York, and, like Browne, a wandering printer from early boyhood. 
When the ' ' Artemus Ward ' ' letters began to appear in the Cleve- 
land Plain-Dealer, Locke was editor of the Bueyrus Journal, a 
few miles to the westward. Their success spurred him to imita- 
tion, but it was not until the firing upon Fort Sumter that he 
succeeded at all in attracting attention. Wingert's Corners, a 
small hamlet in Crawford County, Ohio, had petitioned the legis- 
lature to remove all negroes from the State. There was a humor- 
ous element in such a proposition from such a source. Why not 
give the bellicose little community an appropriate spokesman, a 
sort of "copperhead" "Artemus Ward," and have him declare 
it totally free and independent of the State? The result was a 
letter in the Findlay Jeffersonian, of which Locke was then the 
editor, dated "Wingert's Corners, March the 21, 1861," and 
signed "Petroleum V. Nasby." The "Nasby Letters" had 
begun. The little Ohio hamlet soon proved too small a field for 
the redoubtable Democrat, and to give free play to his love of 
slavery and untaxed whisky, his hatred of "niggers" and his 
self-seeking disloyalty, he was removed to "Confedrit X Roads 
(wich is in the Stait of Kentucky)," from which imaginary 
center letters continued to flow during the war and the recon- 
struction era that followed. 

No humorist ever struck a more popular chord. The letters 
were republished week by week by the entire Northern press, and 
they were looked for by the reading public as eagerly as if they 
were reports of battles. The soldiers in the Federal armies read 
them with gusto, and Lincoln and Chase considered them a real 
source of strength to the Union cause. 

Like most political satires, however, the letters do not wear 
well. They were too much colored by their times. To-day the 
atmosphere of prejudice in which they were written has vanished, 
and the most telling hits and timely jokes raise no smile. A gen- 
eration has arisen which must have foot-notes if it is to read the 
letters. We wonder now what it was that could have so capti- 
vated the first readers. 

' ' Nasby ' ' has little of ' ' Artemus Ward 's ' ' whimsical drollery ; 
indeed, the old Democrat resembles the showman, his prototype, 
only in his rusticity, his ignorance of culture, and his defiance of 
the laws of spelling. One is Launcelot Gobbo, the other is 
Touchstone; one is a mere clown, the other a true humorist, as 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 39 

genuine as life itself is genuine. It is the duty of the clown to 
be a buffoon, to imitate and to come to grief. He essays all the 
parts of the acrobats only to roll ignominiously in the dust. Then 
to the amazement of the beholders he makes a leap that surpasses 
them all. "Nasby" at one time or another enters every sphere 
of the political life of his day and generally with small glory to 
himself. Through "influence" he becomes postmaster of "Con- 
fedrit X Roads," and through ''influence" he loses his position. 

The die is east! The gaiilloteen hez fallen! I am no longer post- 
master at Confedrit X Roads, wich is in the stait uv Kentucky. The 
place that knowd me wunst will know me no more forever; the paper 
wich Deekin Pogram takes will be banded out by a nigger; a nigger 
will hev the openin uv letters addressed to parties residin hereabouts 
containin remittances; a nigger will have the riflin uv letters adrest to 
lottery managers and extraetin the sweets therf rom ; a nigger will be — 
but I could n't dwell upon the disgustin theme no longer. 

This is mere clownishness, and yet no type of humor could have 
been more acceptable to the time that read it. The Revolu- 
tionary War had had its "McFingal," who loudly preached Tory- 
ism and as a reward was beaten about and even tarred and feath- 
ered. Periods of strife and prejudice alwaj^s demand a clown, 
one who concentrates in a single personality the evils of the time. 
"Nasby" stands for blatant copperheadism, just as "McFingal" 
stands for Toryism, and as a result he delighted the multitude. 
His schemes and ideas and adventures were all exaggerated, and 
the persons he dealt with, like President Johnson and his circle, 
were heightened to the point of caricature. Magnified fifty di- 
ameters, the evil or the evil personage, like all things seen under 
the magnifying glass, becomes grotesque and startling. The peo- 
ple at first laugh and then they cry out, ' ' Away with this thing ; 
it is unendurable." 

Refinement is not to be expected in political satires that came 
hot from a period of prejudice and war, but the coarseness of the 
"Nasby" letters goes beyond the bounds of toleration even in 
such writings. They smack of the coarseness of the armies of 
the period. They reek with whisky until one can almost smell 
it as one turns the pages. The uncouth spelling simply adds to 
the coarseness ; it adds nothing to the reality of the characteriza- 
tion. There is an impression constantly that the writer is strain- 
ing for comic effect. He who is capable of such diction as, 



40 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

"They can swear to each other's loyalty, which will reduce the 
cost of evidence to a mere nominal sum," would hardly be guilty 
of such spellings as ' ' yeelded, " " pekoolyer, ' ' and ' ' vayloo, ' ' the 
last standing for ' ' value. ' ' 

The effect of the letters in forming sentiment in the North at 
critical periods was doubtless considerable, but such statements 
as the much-quoted one of George S. Boutwell at Cooper Union 
that the fall of the Confederacy was due to "three forces — the 
army, the navy, and the Nasby letters ' ' — must be taken with cau- 
tion as too much colored by the enthusiastic atmosphere in which 
it was spoken. Their enormous vogue, however, no one can 
question. East and West became one as they perused the re- 
morseless logic of these patriotic satires. Strange as it may seem 
to-day, great numbers of the earlier readers had not a suspicion 
that ' ' Nasby " of " Conf edrit X Roads ' ' was not as real a person 
even as "Jeff" Davis. According to Major Pond, "one meeting 
of the 'faithful' framed a resolution commending the fidelity to 
Democratic principles shown in the Nasby letters, but urging 
Mr. Nasby, for the sake of policy, not to be so outspoken. " ^ In 
the presence of such testimony criticism must be silent. Realism 
can have no greater triumph than that. 

VI 

Periods of prejudice and passion tend always to develop sati- 
rists. The Civil War produced a whole school of them. There 
was "Bill Arp," the "Nasby" of the South, philosopher and 
optimist, who did so much to relieve Southern gloom during the 
reconstruction era; there was "Orpheus C. Kerr," who made 
ludicrous the office-seeking mania of the times; and, greatest of 
them all, including even "Nasby," there was Thomas Nast, who 
worked not with pen but with pencil. 

No sketch of American humor can ignore Nast. His art was 
constructive and compelling. It led the public ; it created a new 
humorous atmosphere, one distinctively original and distinctively 
American. Nast was the father of American caricature. It was 
he who first made effective the topical cartoon for a leader ; who 
first portrayed an individual by some single trait or peculiarity 
of apparel ; and who first made use of symbolic animals in carica- 

9 Memories of the Lyceum. 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 41 

ture, as the Tammany tiger, the Democratic jackass, and the 
Republican elephant — all three of them creations of Nast. His 
work is peculiarly significant. He created a new reading public. 
Even the illiterate could read the cartoons during the war period 
and the Tweed ring days, and it was their reading that put an 
end to the evils portrayed. General Grant when asked, ''Who is 
the foremost figure in civil life developed by the Rebellion?" 
replied instantly, *'I think Thomas Nast. He did as much as 
any one man to preserve the Union and bring the war to an 
end."^° 

VII 

In all the humorous writings of the period there was a deep 
undercurrent of wisdom. Ever since the days of Franklin, the 
typical American has been a maker of aphorisms quaintly ex- 
pressed. The man who for years has wrestled with Nature on 
frontier or farm has evolved a philosophy of his own. American 
life has tended to produce unique individualities: "Sam 
Slicks," ''Natty Bumppos," "Pudd'nhead Wilsons," "David 
Harums," and "Silas Laphams, " — men rich in self -gained wis- 
dom, who talk in aphorisms like Lincoln's, "Don't swap horses 
when you are crossing a stream." 

There has been evolved what may be called the American type 
of aphorism — the concentrated bit of wisdom, old it may be, but 
expressed in such a quaint and striking way as to bring surprise 
and laughter. The humor may come from the homeliness of the 
expression, or the unusual nature of the compared terms, or the 
ludicrous image brought suddenly to the mind. Examples are 
easily found : ' ' Flattery is like kolone water, tew be smelt of, 
but not swallowed"; "It is better to be a young June bug than 
an old bird of paradise"; "The man who blows his own trumpet 
generally plays a solo"; and "A reasonable amount of fleas is 
good f er a dog — keeps him from broodin ' over bein ' a dog. ' ' 

The leader of the latter-day proverbialists was Henry Wheeler 
Shaw, a native of Massachusetts, a student for a time at Hamilton 
College, and then for twenty years a deckhand, farmer, and 
auctioneer in Ohio. He was forty before he began to write. 
His "Essay on the Mule," 1859, found no favor. Rewritten the 
next year in phonetic spelling and submitted to a New York paper 

10 Paine's Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures. 



42 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

as "A Essa on the Muel, bi Josh Billings," it became quickly 
famous. The people of the early seventies wanted local color, 
the tang, as it were, of wild fruit, — life, fresh, genuine, and first- 
hand. They gave a languid approval to Holmes's Poet of the 
Breakfast Table, but bought enormous editions of Josh Billings' 
Farmers' Allmanax. The edition of 1870 sold 90,000 copies in 
three months ; that of 1871 sold no fewer than 127,000. 

The humor of "Josh Billings" is confined to his aphorisms. 
In his longer writings and indeed in his lectures, as we read 
them to-day, he is flat and insufferable. He has little of the 
high spirits and zest and lightness of ' ' Phcenix ' ' and ' ' Ward ' ' : 
he began his humorous work too late in life for such effects ; but 
he surpasses them all in seriousness and moral poise. That the 
times demanded misspelling and clownishness is to be deplored, 
for Shaw was a philosopher, broad and sane ; how broad and sane 
one can see best in Uncle Esek's Wisdom, a column contributed 
for years to the Century Magazine, and, at the request of J. C 
Holland, printed in ordinary spelling. 

''With me everything must be put in two or three lines," he 
once declared, but his two or three lines are always as com- 
pressed as if written by Emerson. He deals for the most part 
with the moral side of life with a common sense as sane as Frank- 
lin's. So wide was the field of his work that one may find quo- 
tations from him on nearly every question that is concerned with 
conduct. His stamp is on all he wrote. One may quote from 
him at random and be sure of wisdom : 

The best cure for rheumatism is to thank the Lord it ain't the gout. 

Building air castles is a harmless business as long as you don't at- 
tempt to live in them. 

Politeness haz won more viktorys than logiek ever haz. 

Jealousy is simply another name for self-love. 

Faith was given to man to lengthen out his reason. 

What the moral army needs just now is more rank and file and fewer 
brigadier generals. 



The great tide of comic writings became fast and furious in 
the seventies. In 1872 no fewer than nine comic papers were 
established in New York alone: The Brickbat, The Cartoon, 
Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun, The Jolly Joker, Nick-nax, Mer- 
ryman's Monthly, The Moon, The Phunny Fellow, The Thistle. 



THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST 43 

and perhaps others. Some died after the first issue, some per- 
sisted longer. Every year saw its own crop of comics rise, 
flourish and die. In 1877 Puch was established, the first really 
successful comic paper in America; in 1881 appeared Judge; 
and in 1883 Life, the first to succeed without politics. 

Very little of all this humorous product can be called litera- 
ture; the greater part of it already has passed into oblivion; 
yet for all that the movement that produced it cannot be neg- 
lected by one who would study the period. The outburst of hu- 
mor in the sixties and the seventies was indeed significant. 
Poor though the product may have been, it was American in 
background and spirit, and it was drawn from no models save 
life itself. For the first time America had a national literature 
in the broad sense of the word, original and colored by its own 
soil. The work of every one in the school was grounded in 
sincerity. The worker saw with his own eyes and he looked 
only for truth. He attacked sentimentality and gush and all 
that was affected and insincere. Born of the great moral awak- 
ening of the war, the humor had in it the Cervantes spirit. 
Nast, for instance, in his later years declared, "I have never 
allowed myself to attack anything I did not believe in my soul 
to be wrong and deserving of the worst fate that could befall 
it." The words are significant. The laughter of the period 
was not the mere crackling of thorns under a pot, not a mere 
fusillade of quips and puns ; there was depth in it and purpose. 
It swept away weakness and wrongs. It purged America and 
brought sanity and health of soul. From the work of the hu- 
morists followed the second accomplishment of the period : those 
careful studies in prose and verse of real life in the various 
sections of America. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY n 

Geobge Hobatio Debet. (1823-1861.) Phcenixiana, or Sketches and 
Burlesques by John Phoenix, N. Y. 1855; The Squibob Papers, N. Y. 1859; 
Phoenixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phoenix. Introduction by 
John Kendrick Bangs. Illustrated by Kemble. N. Y. 1903. 

Charles Farrar Browne. (1834-1867.) Artemus Ward, His Book. 
N. Y. 1862; Artemus Ward, His Travels. 1. Miscellaneous. 2. Among tha 

11 No attempt has been made to make the bibliographies in this volume 
exhaustive or to transcribe title pages. 



44 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Mormons, N. Y. 1865; Betsey Jane Ward. Eur Book of Goaks. N. Y. 
1866; Artemus Ward in London and Other Papers. N. Y. 1867; Artemus 
Ward's Panorama as Exhibited in Egyptian Hall, London. Edited by his 
executors, T. VV. Robertson and E. P. Kingston. N. Y. 1869; The Genial 
Showman, London, 1870; Artemus Ward, His Works Complete, with a bio- 
graphical sketch by M. D. Landon. N. Y. 1875; The Complete Works of 
Artemus Ward. London. 1910. 

David Ross Locke. (1833-1888.) Divers Views, Opinions, and Prophe- 
cies of Yours Trooly, Petroleum V. Nashy. 1865; Nasby Papers. With an 
Introduction by G. A. Sala. London. 1866; Sivingin' Round the Cirkle. By 
Petroleum V. Nasby. His Ideas of Men, Politics, and Things, During 1866. 
Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1867; Ekkoes from Kentucky. By 
Petroleum V. Nasby. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1868; The 
Struggles (Social, Financial, and Political) of Petroleum V. Nasby. With 
an Introduction by Charles Sumner. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 
1872; Nasby in Exile. Toledo. 1882. 

Thomas Nast. (1840-1902.) Thomas Nast. His Period and His Pic- 
tures. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 1904; Life and Letters of Thomas Nast, 
Albert Bigelow Paine, 1910. 

Henry Wheeler Shaw. Josh Billings: His Sayings. New York. 1865; 
Josh Billings on Ice and Other Things. N. Y. 1868 ; Josh Billings' Farmers' 
Allmanax for the Year 1810. N. Y. 1870; Old Probabilities; Contained 
in One Volume. Farmers' Allmanax 1870-1880. N. Y. 1879; Josh Bill- 
ings' Old Farmers' Allmanax, 1870-1879. N. Y. 1902; Complete Comic Writ- 
ings of Josh Billings with biographical introduction. Illustrated by 
'1 homas Nast. N. Y. ; Life of Henry W. Shaw, by F. S. Smith. 1883. 



CHAPTER III 

MARK TWAIN 

With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first 
time really national. He was the first man of letters of any 
distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent his 
boyhood and young manhood near the heart of the continent, 
along the great river during the vital era when it was the bound- 
ary line between known and unknown America, and when it 
resounded from end to end with the shouts and the confusion of 
the first great migration from the East; he lived for six thrilling 
years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities of 
Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product 
of the raw "West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, mar- 
ried a rare soul from one of the refined families of New York 
State, and settled down to a literary career in New England, 
with books and culture and trips abroad, until in his old age 
Oxford University could confer upon him — ''Tom Sawyer," 
whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended before he 
was twelve — the degree that had come to America only as borne 
by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only 
America, and America at a certain period, could produce a 
paradox like that. 

Mark Twain interpreted the "West from the standpoint of a 
native. The group of humorists who had first brought to the 
East the Western spirit and the new laughter had all of them 
been reared in the older sections. John Phoenix and Artemus 
Ward and Josh Billings were bom in New England, and Nasby 
and many of the others were natives of New York State. Alt 
of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and 
had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and ex- 
hilarating, but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a 
part of the West ; he removed from it so as to see it in true per- 
spective, and so became its best interpreter. Hawthorne had once 

45 



46 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

expressed a wish to see some part of America * ' where the damned 
shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark Twain spent his 
life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places. When he 
wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings ; it was as if 
the West itself was dictating its autobiography. 



The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an 
idealist, had left Virginia with his young wife early in the 
twenties to join the restless tide that even then was setting 
strongly westward. Their first settlement was at Gainsborough, 
Tennessee, where was born their first son, Orion, but they re- 
mained there not long. Indeed, like all emigrants of their type, 
they remained nowhere long. During the next ten or eleven 
years five other children were born to them at four different 
stations along the line of their westward progress. When the 
fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were 
living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles 
west of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four 
years later they made what proved to be their last move, set- 
tling at Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town about a hundred 
miles above St. Louis. Here it was that the future Mark Twain 
spent the next fourteen years, those formative years between 
four and eighteen that determine so greatly the bent of the 
later life. 

The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town 
one would pick deliberately for the education of a great man 
of letters. It lay just a few miles above the northern line of 
Pike County — that Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to 
the shiftless, hand-to-mouth, ague-shaken type of humanity later 
to be celebrated so widely as the Pike. Hannibal was not 
a Pike community, but it was typically southwestern in its som- 
nolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The one thing that 
forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River, the 
tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. 
Mark Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this ' 
river and the little town that nestled beside it: 

After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just 
as it was then : the white town drowsing' in the sunshine of a summer's 



MARK TWAIN 47 

morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks 
sitting- in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed 
chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breast, hats slouched over 
their faces, asleep — with shingle shavings enough around to show what 
broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the side- 
walk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and seeds; two or 
three lonely little freight piles scattered around the "levee"; a pile of 
"skids" on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town 
drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the 
head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the 
Avavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the mag- 
nificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; 
the dense forest away on the other side; the "point" above the town, 
and the "point" below, bounding the river glimpse and turning it into 
a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. 
Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of these remote 
"points"; instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and 
prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m boat a-comin' !" and the 
scene changes ! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks w'ake up, a furious 
clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human 
contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead towTi is alive and moving. 
Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurryins: to a common center, the wharf. 
Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as 
upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. . . . The furnace 
doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black 
with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, cahn, imposing, 
the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and 
tumbling out of the chimneys — a husbanded grandeur created with a 
bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped 
on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, 
and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a 
coil of rope in his hand ; the pent steam is screaming through the gage- 
cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then 
they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. 
Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and 
to take in freight, and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time ; 
and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with ! Ten 
minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack- 
staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more 
minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the 
skids once more.^ 

It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mys- 
tery of it, the great unknown world which lay beyond those 
"points" where all things disappeared, that made of the boy a 
restless soul, a dreamer and an idealist — that made of him in- 

1 Old Times on the Mississippi, Chap. I. 



48 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

deed the Mark Twain of the later years. His books nowhere 
rise into the pure serene of literature unless touched at some 
point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously through 
his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De 
Soto and Mark Twain. 

The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when 
the death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country 
newspaper office, that most practical and most exacting of all 
training schools for youth. Two years on the Missouri Courier, 
four years on the Hannibal Journal, then the restlessness of his 
clan sent him wandering into the East even as it had sent Arte- 
mus Ward and Nasby into the West. For fifteen months he 
served as compositor in New York City and Philadelphia, then 
a great homesickness for the river came upon him. From boy- 
hood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a Mississippi steam- 
boat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless compared 
with that satisfying and boundless field of action ; and it is not 
strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace 
Bixby 's * ' cub ' ' at the beginning of a new career. 

During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to 
the almost superhuman task of committing to memory every 
sandbar and point and landmark in twelve hundred miles of a 
shifting, treacherous river. The difficulties he has explained 
fully in his book. It was a college course of four years, and 
no man ever had a better one. To quote his own words : 

In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly ac- 
quainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be 
found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn 
character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal 
interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before — met him 
on the river.2 

It taught him far more than this. The pilot of a great Mis- 
sissippi boat was a man with peculiar responsibilities. The lives 
of the passengers and the safety of the cargo were absolutely 
in his hands. His authority was above even the captain 's. Only 
picked men of courage and judgment with a self-reliance that 
never wavered in any crisis were fit material for pilots. To 
quote Horace Bixby, the most noted of them all: 

2 Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography, i : 128. 



MARK TWAIN 49 

There were no signal lights along the shore in those days, and no 
searchlights on the vessels; eveiything was blind, and on a dark, misty 
night in a river full of snags and shifting sand-bars and changing 
shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty^ 

Under such conditions men were valued only for what they 
actually could do. There was no entrance into the inner circle 
of masters of the river save through genuineness and real effi- 
ciency. Sentimentalizing and boasting and sham died instantly 
in that stern atmosphere. To live for four years in daily con- 
tact with such men taught one coarseness of speech and an ap- 
palling fluency in the use of profanity, but it taught one at the 
same time to look with supreme contempt upon inefficiency and 
pretense. 

The "cub" became at length a pilot, to be entrusted after a 
time with some of the finest boats on the river. He became 
very efficient in his hard-learned profession so conspicuously 
so that he won the commendation even of Bixby, who could say- 
in later years, "Sam Clemens never had an accident either as 
a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for 
a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to any 
one. ' ' * But the war put a sudden end to the piloting. The 
river was closed, and in April, 1861, he went reluctantly back 
to Hannibal. "I loved the profession far better than any I 
have ever followed since," he declared in his later years, "and 
I took a measureless pride in it." It is very possible that but 
for the war and the change which it wrought upon the river, 
Mark Twain might have passed his whole life as a Mississippi 
pilot. 



After a few weeks in a self-recruited troop that fell to pieces 
before it could join the Confederate army, the late pilot, now 
twenty-six years old, started by stage coach across the Plains 
with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed secretary 
to the new Governor of Nevada. It was IMark Twain's entry 
upon what, in college terms, may be called his graduate course. 
It was six years long and it covered one of the most picturesque 
eras in the history of Western America. 

3 Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography, i : 146 

4 Ibid., i: 155. 



50 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

For a few restive months he remained at Carson City as his 
brother's assistant, then in characteristic fashion he broke away 
to join the excited tide of gold seekers that was surging through 
all the mountains of Nevada. During the next year he lived in 
mining camps with prospectors and eager claim-holders. Luck, 
however, seemed against him; at least it promised him little as 
a miner, and when the Virginia City Enterprise, to which he 
had contributed letters, offered him a position on its staff of 
reporters, he jumped at the opportunity. 

Now for two years he lived at the very heart of the mining 
regions of the West, in Virginia City, the home of the Comstock 
lode, then at its highest boom. Everything about him — the new- 
ness and rawness of things, the peculiar social conditions, the 
atmosphere of recklessness and excitement, the money that 
flowed everywhere in fabulous quantities — everything was 
unique. Even the situation of the city was remarkable. Hings- 
ton, who visited it with Artemus Ward while Mark Twain was 
8till a member of the Enterprise staff, speaks of it as "perched 
up on the side of Mt. Davidson some five or six thousand feet 
above sea level, with a magnificent view before us of the desert. 
. . . Nothing but arid rocks and sandy plains sprinkled with 
sage brush. No village for full two hundred miles, and any 
number of the worst type of Indians — the Goshoots — agreeably 
besprinkling the path. "^ Artemus Ward estimated its popula- 
tion at twelve thousand. He was impressed by its wildness, "its 
splendid streets paved with silver ore," "its unadulterated cus- 
sedness," its vigilance committee "which hangs the more vicious 
of the pestiferous crowd," and its fabulous output of silver 
which is "melted down into bricks the size of common house 
bricks, then loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by eight and 
twelve mules, and sent off to San Francisco. ' ' " 

It was indeed a strange area of life that passed before the 
young Mississippi pilot. For two winters he was sent down 
to report the new legislature of the just-organized territory, 
and it was while engaged in this picturesque gala task that 
he sent back his letters signed for the first time Mark Twain. 
That was the winter of 1863. It was time now for him to seek 
a wider field. Accordingly, the following May he went down 

5 A.rtemus Ward, His Travels. 
* Paine's Mark Twain, i : 260. 



MARK TWAIN 51 

to San Francisco, where at length he found employment on the 
Morning Call. 

Now for the first time the young reporter found himself in 
a literary atmosphere. Poets and sketch-writers and humorists 
were everywhere. There was at least one flourishing literary 
journal, the Golden Era, and its luxuriously appointed office 
was the literary center of the Pacific Coast. "Joaquin Miller 
recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah 
Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren 
Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, 
Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. 
Hitchcock assembled there at one time. ' ' '' Charles Henry Webb 
was just starting a literary weekly, the Californian, and when, 
a year later, Bret Harte was made its editor, Mark Twain was 
added to the contributing staff. It was the real beginning of 
his literary career. He received now helpful criticism. In a 
letter written in after years to Thomas Bailey Aldrich he says : 

Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he 
changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a 
writer of paragraplis and chapters that have found a certain favor in 
the eyes of even some of the very deceutest people in the land.^ 

To the Californian and the Era he now contributed that series 
of sketches which later was drawn upon for material for his first 
published book. But the old restlessness was upon him again. 
He struck out into the Tuolumne Hills with Jim Gillis as a 
pocket miner and for months lived as he could in shacks and 
camps, panning between drenching showers worthless gravel, 
expecting every moment to find gold. He found no gold, but 
he found what was infinitely richer. In later years in a letter 
to Gillis he wrote: 

It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. StUl 
it should n't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket- 
hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You 
remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in 
the rain and mud of Angel's Camp — I mean that day we sat around 
the tavern and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled 
him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and 
laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker 

TPaine's Mark Twain, i: 260. 

8 Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 98. 



52 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, 
and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it — I was just 
that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, and 
it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the 
reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of 
dollars sinee.^ 

The publication in New York, May 1, 1867, of The Celebrated 
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches and 
the delivery a week later by the author of The Jumping Frog 
of a lecture on the Sandwich Islands marks the end of the 
period of preparation in Mark Twain's life. A new American 
author had arrived. 

Ill 

Send this Mississippi pilot, printer, adventurer, miner in rough 
camps of the Sierras, to Paris, Italy, Constantinople, and the 
Holy Land, and what will be his impressions? For an answer 
we must read The Innocents Abroad. It will be no Outre 3Ier, 
we are certain of that, and no Pencillings by the Way. Before 
a line of it was written an atmosphere had been created unique 
in American literature, for where, save in the California of 
1867, was there ever optimism, nay, romanticism, that could 
reply instantly to the young reporter who asked to be sent on a 
Don Quixote pilgrimage to Europe and the Orient, ' ' Go. Twelve 
hundred and fifty dollars will be paid for you before the vessel 
sails, and your only instructions are that you will continue to 
write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and 
in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the 
readers of the Alta California" 1 

It was not to be a tour of Europe, as Longfellow and Willis 
and Taylor had made it, the pilgrimage of a devotee to holy 
shrines ; it was to be a great picnic with sixty-seven in the picnic 
party. Moreover, the recorder of it was bound by his instruc- 
tions to report it in the style that had won him California fame. 
It was to be a Western book, written by a Westerner from the 
Western standpoint, but this does not imply that his Western 
readers expected an illiterate production full of coarseness and 
rude wit. California had produced a school of poets and ro- 
mancers; she had serious literary journals, and she was proud 

^ Paine's Mark Twain, i : 393. 



MARK TWAIN 53 

of them. The letters, if California was to set her stamp of ap- 
proval upon them, must have literary charm; they must have, 
moreover, freshness and originality ; and they must sparkle with 
that spirit of humor which already had begun to be recognized 
as a native product. 

We open the book and linger a moment over the preface : 

Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose, 
which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe 
and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes 
of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small 
pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest 
beyond the sea — other books do that, and therefore, even if I were 
competent to do it, there is no need. 

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel- 
writing that may be charged against me — for I think I have seen with 
impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether 
wisely or not. 

Let us read the book straight through. We are impressed 
with the fact that, despite the supposition of its first readers, it 
is not primarily a humorous work. It is a genuine book of 
travels. It is first of all an honest record, even as its author 
averred. In the second place it is the book of a young man, a 
young man on a lark and full of the highest spirits. The world 
is good — it is a good show, though it is full of absurdities and 
of humbugs that should be exposed. The old stock jokes of 
the grand tour — the lack of soap, the charge for candles, the 
meeting of supposed foreigners who break unexpectedly into the 
best of English, and all the well-known others — were new to the 
public then and they came with freshness. Then it is the book 
of one who saw, even as he claimed, with his own eyes. This 
genuine American, with his training on the river and the wild 
frontier where men and things are what they are, no more and 
no less, will be impressed only with genuineness. He will de- 
scribe things precisely as he sees them. Gibraltar ''is pushed 
out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and 
is suggestive of a ' gob ' of mud on the end of a shingle " ; of the 
Coliseum : ' ' everybody recognizes at cnce that ' looped and win- 
dowed' bandbox with a side bitten out"; and of a famous river: 
" It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek 
with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It 
would be a very passable river if they would pump some water 



54 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

into it." That was not written for a joke: it was the way the 
Arno honestly impressed the fonner Mississippi pilot. 

He is not always critical. Genuineness and real worth never 
fail to impress him. Often he stands before a landscape, a city, 
a cathedral, as enthusiastic as any of the older school of travel- 
ers. The book is full of vivid descriptions, some of them almost 
poetic in their spirit and diction. But things must be what they 
pretend to be, or they will disgust him. Everywhere there is 
scorn for the mere echoer of the enthusiasm of others. He will 
not gush over an unworthy thing even if he knows the whole 
world has gushed over it. Da Vinci's "Last Supper," painted 
on a dilapidated wall and stained and scarred and dimmed, may 
once have been beautiful, he admits, but it is not so now. The 
pilgrims who stand before it ''able to speak only in catchy ejac- 
ulations of rapture" fill him with wrath. "How can they see 
what is not visible?" The work of the old masters fills him 
always with indignation. They painted not Hebrews in their 
scriptural pieces, but Italians. "Their nauseous adulation of 
princely patrons was more prominent to me and claimed my 
attention more than the charms of color." "Raphael pictured 
such infernal villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated 
in heaven conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the 
angels (to say nothing of higher personages), and yet my friends 
abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old mas- 
ters. ' ' 

Here we have a note that was to become more and more em- 
phatic in Mark Twain's work with every year he lived: his in- 
dignation at oppression and insincerity. The cathedrals of Italy 
lost their beauty for him when he saw the misery of the popula- 
tion. He stood before the Grand Duomo of Florence. "Like 
all other men I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy 
beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too 
suggestive, and I said '0 sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of 
enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead 
within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you 
rob your church?' Three hundred happy, comfortable priests 
are employed in that cathedral." 

Everywhere he strikes out at sentimentality. When he learns 
how Abelard deliberately sacrificed Heloise to his own selfish 
ideals, he bursts out: "The tons of sentiment I have wasted 



MARK TWAIN 55 

on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance! I shall throt- 
tle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until 
I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to 
any tearful attentions or not." He is eager to see a French 
' ' grissette, " but having seen one, bursts out in true Artemus 
Ward fashion : ' ' Aroint thee, wench ! I sorrow for the vagabond 
student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I en- 
vied him. Thus topples to the earth another idol of my in- 
fancy." The story of Petrarch's love for Laura only fills him 
with pity for the outrageously treated "Mr. Laura," the un- 
known husband of the heroine, who bore the burden but got 
none of the glory, and when they tell the thrilling legend of the 
old medieval castle, he makes only the comment, "Splendid leg- 
end — splendid lie — drive on ! " 

It was a blow at the whole school of American travel writers ; 
it marked the passing of an era. Bret Harte in the first volume 
of the Overland Monthly (1868), was the first to outline the 
Western standpoint: 

The days of sentimental journeyings are over. The dear old book 
of travel . . is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign 
scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and im- 
pressible ladies and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes. 
... A race of good humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have pre- 
cipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their 
predecessors of the eighth centuiy, have paid particular attention to the 
holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial can- 
vasses with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat 
long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brick- 
bats on stained glass windows with damagmg effect. And those gentle- 
men have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish.^*' 

It was the voice of the new West and of the new era. With 
The Innocents Abroad begins the new period in American lit- 
erature. The book is full of the new after-the-war Americanism 
that did its own thinking, that saw with its own eyes, that put 
a halo upon nothing save genuineness and substantial worth. 
It must not be forgotten that America even in the new seven- 
ties was still mawkish with sentimentality. The very year The 
Innocents Abroad appeared. Gates Ajar sold twenty editions. 
Mark Twain came into the age like the Goths into Rome. Stand 
on the solid earth, he cried. Look with your own eyes. Wor- 

10 Over/and Monthly, i: 101. 



56 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

ship nothing but truth and genuineness. Europe is no better 
than America. Como is beautiful, but it is not so beautiful as 
Tahoe. Why this eternal glorification of things simply and 
solely because it is the conventional thing to glorify them? 
"The critic," he wrote in later years to Andrew Lang, "has 
actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a paint- 
ing by Raphael is more valuable tp the civilizations of the earth 
than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy 
gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics 
than Kipling's far-reaching bugle note; and Jonathan Edv/ards 
than the Salvation Army."^^ The new American democracy 
was speaking. To the man who for four years had learned in 
the school of Horace Bixby there was no high and no low save 
as measured, not by appearances or by tradition, but by intrinsic 
worth. 

IV 

It has been customary in libraries to place the earlier works of 
Mark Twain on the same shelf as those of Artemus Ward and 
Josh Billings. To the thousands who laughed at him as he 
lectured from year to year he was a mere maker of fun. The 
public that bought such enormous editions of The Innocents 
Abroad and Roughing It bought them as books to laugh over. 
What shall we say to-day of Mark Twain's humor? A genera- 
tion has arisen to whom he is but a tradition and a set of books ; 
what is the verdict or this generation? 

First of all, it is necessary that we examine the man himself. 
Nature seems to have forced him into the ranks of the come- 
dians. From his mother he inherited a drawl that was inex> 
pressibly funny ; he had a laughable personality, and a laughable 
angle from which he looked at life. He could no more help 
provoking mirth than he could help being himself. Moreover, 
he had been thrown during his formative years into a veritable 
draining school for humorists. On the river and in the mines 
and the raw towns and cities of the West, he had lived in a gale 
of high spirits, of loud laughter, of practical jokes, and droll 
stories that had gone the rough round of the boats or the camps. 
His humor, therefore, was an echo of the laughter of elemental 
men who have been flung into conditions fu]l of incongruities: 

11 Paine's Mark Twain, ii: 894'. 



MARK TWAIN 57 

and strange contrasts. It is the humor of exaggeration run 
wild, of youthful high spirits, of rough practical jokes, of under- 
statement, of irreverence, and gross absurdity. 

But the personality of Mark Twain no longer can give life 
to his humor ; the atmosphere in which it first appeared has gone 
forever; the man himself is becoming a mere legend, shadowy 
and more and more distorted; his humor must be judged now 
like that of Cervantes and Shakespeare, apart from author and 
times. How does it stand the test ? Not at all well. There are 
the high spirits of the new West in it — that element has not evap- 
orated — and there is in it a personal touch, a drollery that was 
his individual contribution to humor. There was a certain drawl 
in his pen as well as in his tongue. It is this alone that saves 
much of his humorous work from flatness. Concerning The 
Jumping Frog, for instance, Haweis asks in true British way, 
"What, I should like to know, is the fun of saying that a frog 
who has been caused to swallow a quantity of shot cannot jump 
so high as he could before?" The answer is that there is no fun 
save in the way the story is told ; in other words, save in thi/ in- 
comparable drawl of Mark Twain's pen. One can only illus- 
trate : 

The feller . . . give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, 
"Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better 'n any 
other frog." 

"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, 
and may be you don't understand 'em ; may be you 've had experience, 
and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were. Any ways I 've got 
my opinion, and I '11 risk forty dollars that he can out-jump any frog in 
Calaveras county." 

And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, 
"Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had 
a frog, I 'd bet you !" 

Or take this episode from The Innocents Abroad where he 
tells of his sensations one night as a boy upon awakening 
and finding the body of a murdered man on the floor of his 
room: 

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort 
of a hurrj', but I simply went — that is sufTicient. I went out at the 
window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, 
but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it. I 
was not scared, but I was considerably agitated. 



58 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

All this and the hundreds of pages like it in The Innocents 
Abroad and Roughing It and the later books is excellent drollery, 
but had Mark Twain written nothing else than this he would be as 
dead now as an author as even ' ' Doesticks. " His drollery is 
best in the work that lies nearest to the source of his first in- 
spiration. As the Western days faded from his memory, his 
comedy became more and more forced, until it could reach at 
last the inane flatness of Adam's Diary and flatter still. Eve's 
Diary. 

The humor that lives, however, is not drollery; it must be 
embodied in a humorous character like Falstaff, for instance, 
or Don Quixote. The most of Mark Twain's fun comes from ex- 
aggerated situations with no attempt at characterization, and 
therein lies his weakness as a humorist. Huckleberry Finn and 
Colonel Sellers come the nearest to being humorous creations, 
but Huckleberry Finn is but a bit of genre, the eternal bad boy 
in a Pike County costume, and Colonel Sellers is but a prelim- 
inary study toward a character, a shadowy figure that we feel 
constantly to be on the point of jumping into greatness without 
ever actually arriving. Narrowly as he may have missed the 
mark in these two characters, Mark Twain cannot be classed 
with the great humorists. 



There are three Mark Twains : there is Mark Twain, the droll 
comedian, who wrote for the masses and made them laugh ; there 
is Mark Twain, the indignant protester, who arose ever and 
amon to true eloquence in his denunciation of tyranny and pre- 
tense ; and there is Mark Twain, the romancer, who in his boy- 
hood had dreamed by the great river and who later caught the 
romance of a period in American life. The masterpiece of the 
first is The Jumping Frog, of the second The Man that Cor- 
rupted Hadleyhurg, and of the third Life on the Mississippi and 
Roughing It. 

It is this third Mark Twain that still lives and that will con- 
tinue to live in American literature. He saw with distinctness 
a unique area of American life. As the brief and picturesque 
era faded away he caught the sunset glory of it and embodied 
it in romance — the steamboat days on the river in the slavery 
era, the old regime in the South, the barbarism of the Plains, 



MARK TWAIN 39 

the great buffalo herds, the wild camps in the gold fields of 
Nevada and California. In half a dozen books: Roughing It, 
Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age ( a few chapters of it), 
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he has 
done work that can never be done again. The world that these 
books depict has vanished as completely as the Bagdad of Haroun 
al Raschid. Not only has he told the story of this vanished 
world, illustrating it with descriptions and characterizations that 
are like Flemish portraits, but he has caught and held the spirit 
of it, and he has thrown over it all the nameless glow of romance. 
It is as golden a land that he leads us through as any we may find 
in Scott, and yet it was drawn from the life with painstaking 
care. Scott and Bulwer and Cooper angered Mark Twain. 
They were careless of facts, they were sentimental, they mis- 
interpreted the spirit of the times they depicted and the men 
and women who lived in them, but these six books of Mark Twain 
may be placed among the source books of American history. No- 
where else can one catch so truly certain phases of the spirit of 
the mid-nineteenth century West. Over every page of them may 
be written those words from the preface of The Innocents 
Abroad, "I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether 
wisely or not." 

The books are six chapters of autobiography. Tom Sawyer 
and Huckleberry Finn are recollections of that boyhood by the 
river after so long a time had elapsed that the day-dreams and 
boyish imaginings were recorded as real happenings; Life on 
the Mississippi records that romantic adventure of his young 
manhood as he recalled it in later days when the old piloting 
era had vanished like a dream of boyhood ; The Gilded Age, a book 
of glorious fragments, has in it his uncle James Lampton drawn 
from life and renamed Colonel Sellers; Roughing It bubbles 
over with the joy and the high spirits and the excitement of those 
marvelous days when the author and the West were young to- 
gether; and Pudd'nhead Wilson gives the tragedy of slavery 
as it passed before his boyish eyes. These books and The Inno- 
cents Abroad are Mark Twain's contribution to the library of 
American classics. The rest of Ms enormously large output, 
despite brilliant passages here and there, does not greatly 
matter. 

They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in 



60 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-con- 
tinued effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, 
Quixotic. What he did he did with his whole soul without re- 
straint or sense of proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack 
of refinement, kept at a minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who 
for years was his editor and severest critic, but likely at any 
moment to crop out. His books, all of them, are monotones, a 
running series of episodes and descriptions all of the same value, 
never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes themselves, how- 
ever, are told with graphic intensity ; some of them are gems 
well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express 
of the Plains : 

The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit 
and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night bis watch 
came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, 
snowing, haibng, or sleeting, or whether his ''beat" was a level straight 
road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it 
led through peaceful regions that swanned with hostile Indians, he 
must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. 
He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, 
or through the blackness of darkness — just as it happened. He rode a 
splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a 
gentleman ; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he 
came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a 
fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in 
the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of 
sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look. 

We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony- 
rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us 
managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a 
hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could 
get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one 
along evei-y moment, and we would see him in broad daylight. Pres- 
ently the driver exclaims: 

"Here he comes!" 

Eveiy neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away 
across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears 
against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so ! 
In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, 
rising and falling — sweeping toward us nearer and nearer — growing 
more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined — nearer and 
still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear — 
another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of 
the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our ex- 
cited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm. 



MARK TWAIN 61 

The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of 
The Gilded Age have few equals in any language for mere pic- 
turing power. He deals largely with the out-of-doors. His 
canvases are bounded only by the horizon: the Mississippi, the 
great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono Lake, the Alkali 
Deserts, and the Sierras — he has handled a continent. Only 
Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast. 
Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft 
has in it something of the spirit of The Odyssey and Pilgrim's 
Progress and Don Quixote. Had Mark Twain's constructive 
skill and his ability to trace the growth of a human soul been 
equal to his picturing power, his Defoe-like command of detail 
and situation, and his mastery of phrase and of narrative, he 
might have said the last word in American fiction. He was a 
product of his section and of his education. College and uni- 
versity would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant, 
refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very 
fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books 
but from life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to 
turn the eyes of America from the romance of Europe to her 
own romantic past. 

VI 

If Artemus Ward is Touchstone, Mark Twain is Lear's Fool. 
He was a knightly soul, sensitive and serious, a nineteenth-cen- 
tury knight errant who would protect the weak of the whole 
world and right their wrongs. The genuineness and honesty 
that had been ground into his soul on the river and in the mines 
where a man was a man only when he could show true manliness, 
were a part of his knightly equipment. When financial disaster 
came to him, as it had come to Scott, through no fault of his own, 
he refused to repudiate the debt as he might have done with no 
discredit to himself, and, though old age was upon him, he set 
out to earn by his own efforts the whole enormous amount. And 
he discharged the debt to the full. He had, moreover, the true 
knight's soul of romance. The Morte d' Arthur and the chroni- 
cles of Joan of Arc, his favorite reading, contained the atmos- 
phere that he loved. He fain would have given his generation 
"pure literature," but they bade him back to his cap and bells. 
Richardson, as late as 1886, classed him with the purveyors of 



62 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

"rude and clownish merriment" and advised him to "make hay 
while the sun shines." ^^ 

So he jested and capered while his heart was heavy with per- 
sonal sorrows that came thick upon him as the years went by, 
and with the baseness and weakness and misery of humanity 
as the spectacle passed under his keen observation. Yet in it 
all he was true to himself. That sentence in the preface tells 
the whole story : "I have written at least honestly. ' ' His own 
generation bought his books for the fun in them ; their children 
are finding now that their fathers bought not, as they sup- 
posed, clownish ephemerge, but true literature, the classics of 
the period. 

And yet — strange paradox! — it was the cap and bells that 
made Mark Twain and that hastened the coming of the new 
period in American literature. The cap and bells it was that 
made him known in every hamlet and in every household of 
America, north and south and east and west, and in all lands 
across all oceans. Only Cooper and Mrs. Stowe of all our Amer- 
ican authors are known so widely. This popularity it was that 
gave wings to the first all- American literature and that inspired 
a new school of American writers. After Mark Twain American 
literature was no longer confined to Boston and its environs; it 
was as wide as the continent itself. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Mark Twain. (1835-1910.) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras 
County and Other Sketches, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing 
It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Old Times on the 
Mississippi (Atlantic Monthly), 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; Life on the 
Mississippi, in book form, 1882; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut 
Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Personal 
Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896; Follotcing the Equator, 1897; Christian 
Science, 1907; Writings of Mark Twain, 25 vols., 1910; My Mark Twain, 
by W. D. Howells, 1911; Mark Ticain, a Biography, by Albert .Bigelow 
Paine, 1912. 

1^ American Literature, i: 396, 521. 



CHAPTER IV 

BRET HARTE 

In his Chronological Outlines of American Literature, Whit- 
comb mentions only thirteen American novels published during 
the seven years before 1870: Taylor's Hannah Thurston, John 
Godfrey's Fortunes, and Story of Kennett; Trowbridge's The 
Three Scouts; Donald G. Mitchell's Doctor Johns; Holmes's 
The Guardian Angel; Lanier's Tiger-Lilies, the transition novel 
of the decade as we shall see later in our study of Lanier ; Louisa 
M. Alcott's Little Women; Beecher's Norwood; Elizabeth Stuart 
Phelps's The Gates Ajar; Higginson's Malhone; Aldrich's Story 
of a Bad Boy; and Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks. To study the 
list is to realize the condition of American fiction during the six- 
ties. It lacked incisiveness and construction and definite color; 
it droned and it preached. 

Before pronouncing the decade the feeblest period in Ameri- 
can fiction since the early twenties of the century, let us ex- 
amine the most lauded novel written in America between 1860 
and 1870, Elsie Vernier (1861). Strictly speaking, it is not a 
novel at all: it is another Autocrat volume, chatty, discursive, 
brilliant. The Brahmins, sons and grandsons of ministers, 
might enter the law, medicine, teaching, literature, the lyceum 
lecture field — they never ceased to preach. New England for 
two centuries was a vast pulpit and American literature dur- 
ing a whole period was written on sermon paper. "The real 
aim of the story," the Autocrat naively observ^es in his preface, 
"was to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsi- 
bility." He is in no hurry, however. "We read four chapters 
before we learn even the heroine's name. A novel can reason- 
ably be expected to center about its title character: Elsie Ven- 
ner speaks seventeen times during the story, and eleven of these 
utterances are delivered from her death-bed at the close of the 
book. There is no growth in character, no gradual moving of 

63 



64 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

events to a culmination, no clear picture even of the central fig- 
ure. Elsie is a mere case: the book, so far as she is concerned, 
is the record of a clinic. But even the clinic is not suffered to 
move uninterruptedly. Digressions are as frequent as even in 
the Autocrat papers. A widow is introduced for no apparent 
reason, studied for a chapter, and then dropped from the nar- 
rative. We never feel like one who has lost himself for a time 
in the life of another in a new world under new skies; we feel 
rather like one who is being personally conducted through New 
England by a skilful guide. Note this partial prospectus of 
what he has to show: Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, 
caste in New England, rural schools, Northampton and Mt. 
Holyoke, mountain vegetation, rattlesnakes in Massachusetts, 
the New England mansion house, school compositions, the old 
type of meeting house, varieties of school girls, the old-time 
India merchant, oysters in New England, hired help, colonial 
chimneys, young ladies ' seminaries, the hemlock tree. The topics 
are interesting ones and they are brilliantly treated, often at 
length, but in a novel, even one written by Dr. Holmes, such 
things are "lumber." The novel is typical of the fiction of the 
era. It is discursive, loosely constructed, vague in its characteri- 
zation, and lacking in cumulative force. 

It is significant that the magazines of the period had very 
little use for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, 
Harper's Magazine alone published no fewer than ten long serials 
by English novelists: Denis Duval by Thackeray; The Small 
House at Allington by Trollope; Our Mutual Friend by Dickens; 
The Unkind Word, Woman's Kingdom, and A Brave Lady by 
Dinah Mulock Craik; Armadale by Wilkie Collins; 3Iy Enemy's 
Daughter by Justin M'Carthy; Antcros by the Author of Guy 
Livingstone [G. A. Lawrence] ; and Anne Furness by the Author 
of ^label's Progress [Mrs. T. A, Trollope]. Even the Atlantic 
Monthly left its New England group of producers to publish 
Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt in twelve instalments. In 1871 
Scribner's Monthly began the prospectus of its second volume 
with this announcement: 

Our contributors are among the best who write in the English lan- 
guage. George MaeDonald — "the best of living story-writers" — will 
continue his beautiful story, entitled Wilfred Cumhermede, throughout 
the volume. We have the refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's 



BEET HARTE 65 

stories at the hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Seudder. We 
have engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest 
story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain — ^not even ex- 
cepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially for us an 
exquisitely characteristic story, etc. 

The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. 
Charles Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874 : ' * There is not much 
in the magazine [Atlantic] that is likely to be read twice save 
by its writers, and this is what the great public likes. There 
must be a revival of letters in America, if literature as an art is 
not to become extinct. You should hear Godkin express himself 
in private on this topic." ^ 

No wonder that the book-reviewer of Harper's Magazine for 
May, 1870, with nothing better before him than Miss Van Kort- 
land, Anonjanous; Hedged In, by Miss Phelps; and Askaros 
Kassis, by DeLeon, should have begun his review, "We are so 
weary of depending on England, France, and Germany for fic- 
tion, and so hungry for some genuine American romance, that we 
are not inclined to read very critically the three characteristic 
American novels which lie on our table." No wonder that when 
Harte's The.JLuck of Roaring Camp in the Overland Monthly 
was read in the J.f7anh'c office,- Fields sent by return mail a re- 
quest "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it, 
and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "wel- 
coming the little foundling of California literature with an en- 
thusiasm that half frightened its author. " - -v 

The new American fiction began with Bret Harte. y 



To turn from Mark Twain to Bret Harte is like turning from 
the great river on a summer night, fragrant and star-lit, to the 
glamour and unreality of the city theater. No contrast could be 
more striking. Francis Brett Harte, born August 25, 1839, was 
preeminently a man of the East and preeminently also a man 
of the city. He was born at Albany, New York, he spent his 
childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, in Philadelphia, in 
Lowell, INIassachusetts, in Boston and other places, and the 
formative years between nine and eighteen he passed in Brooklyn 

1 Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ii : 36. 

2 Harte. Introduction to the Collected Works. 



66 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and New York City. He lived all his young life in an atmos- 
phere of culture. His father, a Union College man, a scholar, 
and a teacher who knew French and Spanish and Italian, Latin 
and Greek, had accumulated a large and well-selected library in 
which the boy, frail and sensitive, too frail in his early years 
to attend school, spent much of his childhood, reaJing Shake- 
speare and Froissart at six and Charles Dickens at seven. His 
mother, a woman of culture, directed his reading, and criticized 
with discernment his earliest attempts at poetry. It was the 
training school for a poet, a Bryant or a Longfellow, who should 
look to the older art for models and be inspired with the dream 
that had sent Irving and Willis and Taylor as pilgrims to the 
holy lands of literature across the sea. 

The turning point in Harte's life came in 1854, when he was 
in his fifteenth year. His biographer, Merwin, tells the story : 

In 1853 bis mother [who had been a widow for nine years] went to 
California with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her 
home there with her elder son, Henry. She bad intended to take with 
her the other two children, Margaret and Francis Brett; but as the 
daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and 
they followed in Febniary, 1854. They traveled by the Nicaragua 
route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely 
in San Francisco.^ 

The mother must have remarried shortly after her arrival in 
California, for two sentences later on the biographer records 
that "They went the next morning to Oakland across the Bay, 
where their mother and her second husband, Colonel Andrew 
Williams, were living." 

The young poet had been transplanted into new and strange 
soil and he took root slowly. During the next year, making 
his home with his mother at Oakland, he attempted to teach 
school and then to serve as an apothecary's assistant, but he 
made little headway in either profession. His heart was far 
away from the rough, new land that he had entered. He wrote 
poems and stories and sketches and sent them to the Eastern 
magazines; he read interminably, and dreamed of literature just 
as Aldrich and Timrod and Hayne and Stedman and Stoddard 
were even then dreaming of it on the other side of the conti- 
nent. 

3 Life of Bret Earte, 17. 



BRET HARTE 67 

The next two years of liis life, despite the efforts of his bi- 
ographers, are vague and conjectural. It was his wander 
period. He began as tutor in a private family in Humboldt 
County, then, according to Charles Warren Stoddard, "he was 
an express messenger in the mountains when the office was the 
target of every lawless rifle in the territory ; he was glutted with 
adventurous experiences."* Not for long, however. He seems 
to have spent the rest of the two years — prosaic anticlimax! — 
as a type-setter on the Humboldt Times and the Northern Cali- 
fornia, as a teacher in the town of Union, and as a drug clerk. 
That he ever was a miner is gravely to be doubted. He had 
small taste for roughing it and little sympathy with the typical 
California life of the times. He was a poet, rather, a man of 
the city, a reader of romance, how wide and attentive a reader 
we may judge from Condensed Novels which he soon after began 
to contribute to the San Francisco press. 

The events in his life during the next fourteen years in San 
Francisco are quickly summarized. For the greater part of it he 
was connected with the Golden Era, first as a type-setter and 
later as an editor and contributor. In 1862 he was married. 
Two years later he was appointed Secretary of the California 
Mint, an office that allowed him abundant time for literary 
work. He was connected with Webb's brilliant and short-lived 
Calif ornian, first as contributor and later as editor, and in 1868, 
when the Overland Monthly, which was to be the Atlantic of 
Western America, was founded, he was made the editor. The 
Luck of Roaring Camp in the second number and Plain Zan- 
guage from Truthful James in the September, 1870, number, 
brought him a popularity that in suddenness and extent had had 
no precedent in America, save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and 
Uncle Tom's Cabin. The enormous applause intoxicated him; 
California became too narrow and provincial; and in 1871 he 
left it, joyous as one who is returning home after long exile. 

II 

If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be 
remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out delib- 
erately to add a new province to American literature. During 

* Exits and Entrances, 241. 



68 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his 
own statement, "The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story 
of M'liss — the first a dialectical poem, the second a California 
romance— his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly charac- 
teristic Western American literature. He would like to offer 
these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very en- 
thusiastic belief in such a possibility — a belief which never de- 
serted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known 
pages of the Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a 
larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The^ 
Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of The Heathen Chinee." ^ 

But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward 
a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His 
first vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been in- 
spired by Irving, and he wrote in the Sketch Book manner dur- 
ing the greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. 
Behind the California of the gold and the excitement lay three 
hundred years of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had 
done for the Hudson why could he not do for the Mission lands 
and the Spanish occupation, "that glorious Indian summer of 
California history, around which so much poetical haze still lin- 
gers — that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to 
be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and 
the reviving springs of American conquest"? ^ It was a vision 
worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and 
was abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines 
his early work. 

He voiced it in The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 
1868, in the same volume of the Overland Monthly that con- 
tained T}ie_Luckof Roaring Camp: 

Borne on the swell of your long waves receding, 

I touch the further Past — 
I see the dying glow of Spanish glory, 

The sunset dream and last. 

Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers; 

The white Presidio; 
The swart commander in his leathern jerkin. 

The priest in stole of snow. 

5 Harte's General Introduction to his Works. 
« The Right Eye of the Commander. 



BRET HARTE 69 

Once more I see Portata's cross uplifting 

Above the setting sun; 
And past the headland, northward, slowly drifting 

The freighted galleon. 

It must not be forgotten that his Legend of Monte del Diablo, 
a careful Irvingesque romance, appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly as early as 1863. During the same period he wrote 
The Right Eye of the Commander, The Legend of Devil's Point, 
The Adventure of Padre Viventio, and many short pieces, enough, 
indeed, to make up a volume the size of The Sketch Book. 

Despite its echoes of Irving, it is significant work. Harte 
was the first to catch sight of a whole vast field of American 
romance. Again and again he recurs to it in his later poetry 
and prose; notably in Concepcion de Arguello and its prose ver- 
sion on page 191 of the first volume of the Overland Monthly, A 
Convert of the Mission, The Story of a Mine, In the Carquinez 
Woods, and in Gabriel Conroy, that chaotic book which has in it 
the materials for the greatest of American romances. When- 
ever he touches this old Spanish land he throws over it the mel- 
low Washington Irving glow that had so thrilled him in his 
earlier years, and he writes with power. The Spanish part of 
Gabriel Conroy is exquisite ; its atmosphere is faultless : 

If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of 
the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural ex- 
pression, that spot was the ancient and time-honored pueblo and Mis- 
sion of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expression- 
less skies of the summer seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conserva- 
tism which expelled all innovation and was its distingiaishing mark. . . . 

As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large adobe dwelling, 
and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw 
around him eveiywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly 
and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if 
they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it 
had shone for the last hundred years ; the gaimt wolf-like dogs ran out 
and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the pre- 
ceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild, half- 
broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the veranda of the 
long low Fonda, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; 
there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed adobe wall, as 
barren and g-uiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous 
and expressionless as the stating sky above; there were the white, 
dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and 
pear trees, twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of ap^e. 



70 AMEKICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

, . . The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were 
something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon 
had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, 
in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the 
curving Point of Pines. 

Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they 
nevertheless opened the way for a new school of American ro- 
mance. 

Ill 

Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was 
M'liss, written for the Golden Era sometime before 1867. For 
tlTe^Tudent of his literary art it is the most important of all his 
writings, especially important because of the revision which he 
made of it later after he had evolved his final manner. It is 
transition work. The backgrounds are traced in with Irving- 
like care; the character of the schoolmaster is done with artistic 
restraint and certainty of touch. M'liss is exquisitely handled. 
There is nothing better in all his work than this study of the 
fiery, jealous little heart of the neglected child. It is not neces- 
sarily a California story; it could have happened as well even 
in New England. It is not genre work, not mere exploiting 
of local oddities ; it is worked out in life itself, and it strikes the 
universal human chord that brings it into the realm of true art. 

But even in the earlier version of the story there are false 
notes. The names of the characters strike us as unusual: 
M'liss, McSnagley, Morpher, Clytenmestra, Kerg, Aristides, Cel- 
lerstina. We feel that the author is straining for the unusual; 
and we feel it more when the Rev. Joshua McSnagley comes upon 
the scene : 

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed 
that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he had got over the 
"neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had been troubled with the 
dumb "ager" since last conference. But he had learned to "rastle and 
pray." Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain 
method of curing the dumb "ager" upon the book and volume of his 
brain, Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. 
"She is an adornment to Christewanity, and has a likely growin' young 
family," added Mr. McSnagley. 

Somehow it does not ring true. The author is thinking of 
the effect he hopes to produce. He must fill his reader with 



BRET HARTE 71 

wonder. *'A saintly Raphael-face, with blond beard and soft 
blue eyes, belonging to the biggest scamp in the diggings, turned 
toward the child and whispered, 'Stick to it, M'liss.' " That 
sentence is the key to the author's later manner. ''Life in Cali- 
fornia is a paradox," he seems everywhere to say, "just look at 
this. ' ' 

The transition from F. B. Harte the poet and romancer to Bret 
Harte the paradox maker and showman came through Dickens. 
It was the Dickens era in America. The great novelist had made 
his second tour of the country between November, 1867, and 
April, 1868, and his journeyings had been a triumphal progress. 
All classes everywhere were reading his books, and great numbers 
knew them literally by heart. Dickens wrote home from Wash- 
ington, "Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was here. . . . 
He is acquainted with the minutest details of my books. Give 
him a passage anywhere and he will instantly cap it ana go on 
with the context. . . , Never went to sleep at night without first 
reading something from my books which were always with 
him. ' ' ^ The same could have been said of Harte himself. Says 
Peraberton, "His knowledge of his [Dickens's] books was un- 
rivaled. ... He could have passed Charles Calverley's famous 
Pickwick Examination Paper with honors."^ Everybody knew 
his Dickens; for a generation men could not speak of the man 
with moderation. Even a critic like Moncure D. Conway could 
say of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop: "To this day 
I cannot help suspecting the sanity of any one who does not con- 
cede that they are the two best novels ever written.'' ^ The 
death of Dickens in 1870 let loose all over America a flood of 
eulogy and increased enormously the already great sales of his 
books. 

The art of Dickens was peculiar. He had found in the lower 
strata of the population of London, that vast settling pool of Great 
Britain, a society made up of many sharply individualized per- 
sonalities, abnormalities in body and soul, results of the peculiar 
inflexible characteristics of the English race and their hard and 
fast social distinctions. From fragments of this lower London 
Dickens built him a world of his own and peopled it with com- 

7 Letters of Charles Dickens, 667. 

8 The Life of Bret Harte, 166. 

9 Harper's Magazine, 41:610. 



72 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

posite creations such as one finds nowhere save in the folklore 
of a primitive people — creatures as strange as their names, Quilp, 
Scrooge, Cratchit, Squeers, Suagsby. So tremendously did he be- 
lieve in them, that we believe in them ourselves. So overflowing 
was he with high spirits and boisterous laughter that before we 
realize it we have surrendered completely and are living hilari- 
ously not in a land of actual men and women, but in the world 
that never was and never can be save in the books of Dickens. 
He never analyzed, he never sought the heart of things, or got 
at all below the surface of his characters ; he was content simply 
to exhibit his marvelous creations with all their ludicrous incon- 
gruities, and the show is so entertaining and the showman ex- 
hibits it with such zest, such joyous abandon, that we stand like 
children and lose ourselves in wonder and enjoyment. 

"We can see now that the time was ripe for a California 
Dickens. There was a prepared audience — the whole nation was 
reading the great novelist of the people. California, moreover, 
was in the fierce light of the gold excitement — anything that 
came from it would find eager readers. It was a veritable 
Dickens land, more full of strange types than even the slums of 
London: Pikes, Greasers, Yankees, Chinese, gamblers, adven- 
turers from all the wild places of the world, desperadoes, soldiers 
of fortune, restless seekers for excitement and gold. Everything 
was ready. Harte doubtless blundered into his success ; doubt- 
less he did not reason about the matter at all, yet the result re- 
mains the same : he came at the precise moment with the precise 
form of literature that the world was most sure to accept. It 
came about as the most natural thing in the world. Saturated 
with Dickens as he had been from his childhood, it is not strange 
that this motley society and its amazing surroundings should 
have appealed to him from the objective and the picturesque 
side ; it is not strange that, even as did Dickens, he should have 
selected types and heightened them and peopled a new world 
with them ; it is not strange that he should have given these types 
Dickens-like names: Higgles, McCorkle, Culpepper Starbottle, 
Calhoun Bungstarter, Fagg, Twinkler, Rattler, Mixer, Stubbs, 
Nibbles. His work is redolent of Dickens. Sometimes we seem 
to be reading a clever parody after the fashion of the Condensed 
Novels, as for instance tiiis from The Romance of Madrono Hol- 
low: 



BRET HARTE 73 

There was not much to hear. The hat was saymg to the ribbons that 
it was a fine night, and remarking generally upon the clear outline of 
the Sierras against the blue-black sky. The ribbons, it so appeared, 
had admired this all the way home, and asked the hat if it had ever 
seen anything half so lovely as the moonlight on the summit? The 
hat never had; it recalled some lovely nights in the South hi Alabama 
("in the South in AJilabahm" was the way the old man had heard it), 
but then there were other things that made the night seem so pleasant. 
The ribbons could not possibly conceive what the hat could be thinking 
about. At this point there was a pause, of which Mr. Folinsbee availed 
himself to walk very grimly and craunchingly down the gravel walk 
toward the gate. Then the hat was lifted, and disappeared in the 
shadow, and Mr. Folinsbee confronted only the half-foolish, half-mis- 
chievous, but wholly pretty face of his daughter. 

M'liss is full of such echoes. A little later than M'liss, when 
he was required to furnish the Overland with a distinctly Cali- 
fornian story, he set about examining his field precisely as 
Dickens would have done. "Wliat are some of the most unusual 
phases of this unique epoch?" he asked himself. During a 
short period women and children were rare in the remote mining 
districts. What would result if a bahy were born in one of the 
roughest and most masculine of the camps? It is not hard to 
conjecture how Dickens would have handled the problem; The 
Liwk_of Roar big Camp is Harte's solution. The situation and 
the characters are both unique. They would have been impos- 
sible in any other place or at any other moment in the world's 
history. So with all of Harte 's later stories : undoubtedly there 
may have been a Roaring Camp and undoubtedly there were 
Cherokee Sals and Kentucks, undoubtedly the gold rush devel- 
oped here and there Jack Hamlins and Tennessees and Uncle 
Billys and Yuba Bills. The weakness of Harte is that he takes 
these and peoples California with them. Like Dickens, he selects 
a few picturesque and grotesque exceptions and makes of them a 
whole social system. 

Harte had nothing of the earnestness and the sincerity of the 
older master; after a time he outgrew his manner, and evolved 
style of his own — compressed, rapid, picturesque ; but this earlj^ 
point of view he never changed. He sought ever for the startling 
and the dramatic and he elaborated the outside of it with care. 
He studied the map of California for picturesque names, just 
as Dickens studied the street signs of London. Ho passed by 
the common materials of human life to exhibit the strange 



74 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

phenomena of one single accidental moment in a corner of 
America. 

Once he had begun, however, there was no possibility of stop- 
ping. The people demanded work like Ths Luck of Roaring 
Camp and would accept nothing else. It is pathetic to see him 
during the early years of his great fame, trying to impress upon 
the reading public that he is a poet after the old definition of 
the word. The Atlantic had paid him $10,000 to write for a 
year work like The Luck^^af -Roaring Camp. He gave four 
stories, and he gave also five careful poems of the Lougfellow- 
Whittier type. By 1873 he had put forth no fewer than fourteen 
books, nine of them being poems or collections of his poetry. In 
vain. The public ordered him back to the mines and camps that 
even then were as obsolete as the pony express across the Plains. 

Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of 
mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, 
he went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later 
he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for 
five years. The rest of his life he spent in London, writing year 
after year new books of California stories. He never returned 
to America; he was estranged from his family; he seemed to 
wish to sever himself entirely from all that had to do with his 
earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was buried in Frimby 
churchyard, in Surrey. 

IV 

A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of 
Harte ? First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts 
at character development. Each personage introduced is the 
same at the close of the story as at the opening. He has no fully 
studied character: we have a burning moment, a flashlight 
glimpse — intense, paradoxical, startling, then no more. We 
lever see the person again. The name may appear in later 
.ketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel Star- 
)ottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage 
■ ' business, ' ' and the well known ' ' gags ' ' — as, for instance, a suc- 
cession of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba 
Bill" is Harte 's synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for 
gambler. We have a feeling constantly that the characters are 
brought in simply to excite wonder. Gabriel Conroy devotes his 



BRET HARTE 75 

life for years to the finding of his sister Grace. He leaves his 
wife to search for her ; he can think of nothing else ; yet when at 
length he does find her among the witnesses in a courtroom he 
takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however, 
when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at 
all, has given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon. 

His characters may perhaps be true to facts; he may be able 
to give the prototype in every c£ise ; and yet we are not convinced. 
The stories told by the college freshman at home during his first 
Christmas vacation may all be true, and yet they may give a 
very false idea of college life in its entirety. So it is with Harte. 
The very year that he landed in California a procession of one 
thousand children, each child with a flower in his hand, marched 
one day in San Francisco. The Luck of Boaring Camp gives no 
such impression. In all save the remotest camps there were 
churches and worshipers, yet who would suspect it from Harte 's 
tales ? California has never accepted Harte 's picture of its life, 
just as the South has never accepted Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is 
not fair to picture an era simply by dwelling on its exceptions 
and its grotesque possibilities. Art must rest upon the whole 
truth, not upon half truths. 

The truth is that the man had no deep and abiding philosophy 
of life ; he had indeed no philosophy at all. In the words of his 
discerning biographer, Merwin, 

There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his 
nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown 
only as he lived in the life of others. Even his poetry is dramatic, not 
lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere^ 
advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned only with 
the concrete ; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down 
a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. The 
note of sincerity is wanting.^° 

The fact that his rascals in a crisis often do deeds of sublime 
heroism must not deceive us, despite the author's protestations 
of a great moral purpose underlying his work. 

Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as 
an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid 
down by a Great Poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son 
and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundi'ed 

^0 Life of Bret Harte, 286. 



76 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are 
foi'gotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, 
but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily 
living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this 
from the housetops,^^ 

This is insincere to the point of bathos. We feel like saying, 
"Bah!" Harte makes his villains heroes at the crisis simply 
to add finesse to his tale. He is dealing with paradoxes; he is 
working for his reader's wonder. If in a moment where pity is 
expected, woman is harsh and man tender; if the reputed good 
man is a rascal at the supreme test, and the reputed rascal proves 
suddenly to be a saint, it adds to the effectiveness of the tale. 

Everywhere there is the atmosphere of the theater. The 
painted backgrounds are marvels of skill. There are vast color 
effects, and picturesque tableaux. There is a theatric quality 
about the heroines; we can see the make-up upon their faces. 
Too often they talk the stagiest of stage talk as in the first parting 
scene between Grace Conroy and Arthur Poinset. The end is 
always a drop-curtain effect. Even Tennessee's Partner must 
have its appropriate curtain. We can imagine a double curtain 
for The Outcasts of Poker Flat: the first tableau showing the two 
dead women in the snow, the second the inscription over the body 
of Oakhurst, the gambler. Instead of closing the book with a 
long breath as after looking at a quivering section of human life, 
we say, ' ' How strange ! What brilliant work ! ' ' and we feel like 
clapping our hands for a tableau of all the cast, the spot light, 
and the quick curtain. 

Bret Harte had no real affection for the West ; he never again 
visited it ; he never even wrote to the friends he had left there. 
With Mark Twain it was greatly different. The West to him 
was home; he loved it; he recorded its deepest life with sym- 
pathy. To Harte it was simply a source of literary material. 
He skimmed its surface and found only the melodramatic and 
the sensational. 



And yet after all the real strength of Bret Harte came from 
his contact with this Western soil. Irving and Dickens and the 
early models that had so molded him served only to teach him 

11 General Introduction to his Works. 



BRET HARTE 77 

his trade; the breath of life in his works all came from the 
new life of the West. It would be impossible for one to live 
during seventeen years of his early life in an atmosphere like 
that of the west coast and not be transformed by it. Taking 
his work altogether there is in it far more of California than 
there is of Dickens or of all the others of the older writers. 
Only a few things of the life of the West seem to have impressed 
him. He lived fifteen years in San Francisco yet we see almost 
nothing of that city in his work; the dramatic career of the 
'^^igilantes he touched upon almost not at all. He selected the 
remote mining camps for his field and yet he seems to have been 
impressed by very few of the types that were found in them. 
Only a few of them ring true at every point, Yuba Bill the 
stage driver is one. We feel that he was drawn by a master who 
has actually lived with his model. Yuba Bill is the typical man 
of the region and the period — masterful, self-reliant, full of a 
humor that is elemental. There is no prolonged study of him. 
We see him for a tense moment as the stage swings up to the 
station, and then he is gone. He is as devoid of sentimentality 
as even Horace Bixby. The company have been shouting 
' ' Higgles ! " at the dark cabin but have got no reply save from 
what proves later to have been a parrot : 

"Extraordinary echo," said the Judge. 

"Extraordinaiy d — d skunk!" roared the driver contemptuously. 
"Come out of that, Miggles, and show yourself. Be a man." 

Higgles, however, did not appear. 

Yuba Bill hesitated no longer. Taking a heavy stone from the road, 
he battered down the gate, and with the expressman entered the en- 
closure. . . . 

"Do you know this Miggles*?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill. 

"No, nor don't want to," said Bill shortly. 

"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge, as he thought of the 
barred gate. 

"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "had n't you better 
go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced ? I 'm going in," and 
he pushed open the door of the building. 

That rings true. If one were obliged to ride at night over a 
wild, road-agent-infested trail there is no character in all fiction 
whom we would more gladly have for driver than Yuba Bill. 
We would like to see more of him than the brief glimpses al- 
lowed us by his creator. 



78 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The humor in Harte is largely Western humor. There is the 
true California ring in such conversations, for instance, as those 
in the earlier pages of Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. It is an 
atmosphere rather than a series of hits. One finds it in The 
Outcasts of Poker Flat: 

A few of the committee had urged hanging him [Oakhurst] as a pos- 
sible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his 
pockets of the sums he had won from them. "It 's agin justice," said 
Jim Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp — an en- 
tire stranger — cany away our money." But a crude sentiment of 
equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough 
to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice. 

This atmosphere of humor shimmers through all of the stories. 
There is never uproarious merriment, but there is constant humor. 
The conjugal troubles of the "old man" in How Santa Clans 
Came to Simpson's Bar are thus touched upon: 

His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and 
secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he 
invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity. On arriv- 
ing, the party found the shy, petite creature quietly engaged in her 
household duties and retired abashed and discomfited. But the sensi- 
tive woman did not easily recover from her shock of this exti'aordinary 
outrage. It was with diffleulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently 
to release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and 
escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her be- 
reaved husband. The old man's present wife had been his cook. She 
was large, loyal, and aggressive. 

His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, 
yet for all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of 
the early mining camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of 
the old Spanish Colonial civilization that was swept away by the 
Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His name cannot fail to go down 
with the era he recorded, and to identify oneself forever with an 
era, even though that era be a brief and restricted one, is no 
small achievement. He is the writer of the epic of the gold rush 
of the middle century in America, and whatever the quality of 
that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868 : 

It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a hard, ugly, 
unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such are heroes and aris- 
tocracies born. Three hundred years, and what a glamor shall hang 
about it! ... A thousand years, and a new Virgil sing-s the Americao 



BRET HARTE 79 

JEneid with the episode of Jason and the California golden fleece, and 
the historians tell us it is a myth ! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but 
your great-great-great-great -grandchildren shall weep reverential tears. 
History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the making" but how 
heroic it becomes in the perspective of five centuries! ^^ 

And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt 
with elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba 
Bill. His canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. 
His human drama is played before a truly Western background. 
While Tennessee is being tried for his life, "Above all this, 
etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and pas- 
sionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." At moments 
of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The wolves 
and the fire in the story In the Carqiiinez Woods are intensely 
vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's 
Bar is told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the 
description of the snow-storm at the opening of Gabriel Conroy 
reminds one of Thomas Hardy. 

VI 

Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short 
story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas 
Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics 
of this most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the 
form is an American product. We can do no better than to 
quote from his essay on The Rise of the Short Story. It traces 
the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to literature. 

But while the American literaiy imagination was still under the 
influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was developing to 
diminish its power. It was humor, of a quality as distinct and original 
as the country and civilization in which it was developed. It was first 
noticeable in the anecdote or "story," and, after the fashion of such 
beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, 
the gatherings in the "country store," and finally at public meetings in 
the mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were clinched and political 
principles illustrated by "a funny stoiy." It invaded even the camp 
meeting and pulpit. It at last received the currency of the public 
press. But wherever met it was so distinctly original and novel, so 
individual and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated 
abroad as "an American story." Crude at first, it received a literary 

12 Overland Monthly, 1:191. 



80 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

polish in the press, but its dommant quality remained. It was concise 
and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a 
miracle of under-statement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the 
habits of thought of a people or locality. It gave a new interest to 
slang. From a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, 
but always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It was 
a foe to prolixity of any kind ; it admitted no fine wi'iting nor affecta- 
tion of style. It went directly to the point. It was burdened by no 
conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it was devoid of all moral 
responsibility, but it was original! By degrees it developed character 
with its incident, often, in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of 
a communitj' or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an 
unnecessary word. It became — and still exists as — an essential feature 
of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the American ''short 
story." 13 

Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang 
from the Western humor and was developed by the circumstances 
that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are models. 
They contain not a superfluous word; they handle a single in- 
cident with graphic power ; they close without moral or comment. 
The form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and 
powers. With him the story must of necessity be brief. He who 
depicts the one good deed in a wicked life must of necessity use 
a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack Hamlin or 
Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the 
author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel 
with Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable, 

Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like 
Byron, he must bring down his quarry at a single spring ; he had 
no patience to pursue it at length. Gabriel Conroy is at the 
same time the best and the worst American novel of the century. 
It is the best in its wealth of truly American material and in the 
brilliant passages that strew its pages ; it is the worse in that it 
utterly fails in its construction, and that it builds up its char- 
acters wholly from the outside. Its hero, moreover, changes his 
personality completely three times during the story, and its 
heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the Southwest, 
then a Spanish senorita : 

Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small face 
was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished copper. . . . 
The imperious habit of command ; an almost despotic control of a hun- 

13 Pemberton's Life of Bret Harte, 298. 



BRET HARTE 81 

dred servants; a certain barbaric contempt for the unlimited revenues 
at her disposal that prompted the act, became her wonderfully. In her 
impatience the quick blood glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little 
slipper tapped the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the dark- 
ness. 

Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish 
family after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, 
and had been given her complexion by means of a vegetable 
stain. But there is still another lightning change. At the end 
of the book she becomes a Pike again and weakly marries the 
unrepentant rascal who earlier had betrayed her. In the words 
of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not even good melo- 
drama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the end. 

Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single 
burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in 
lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a com- 
munity and left the rest in darkness. 

VII 

In his later years Harte 's backgrounds became less sharp in 
outline. His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres 
more mellow and golden. The old Spanish dream of the days 
of his early art possessed him again, and he added to his gallery 
of real creations — M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack Hamlin, Tennessee's 
Partner — one that perhaps is the strongest of them all, Enriquez 
Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte ever did will 
surpass that creation of his old age. In Chu Chu, The Devotion 
of Enriquez, and The Passing of Enriquez we have the fitting 
close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once 
at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as 
he makes his defense: 

Then they say, "Dry up, and sell out"; and the great bankers say, 
"Name your own price for your stock, and resign." And I say, "There 
is not gold enough in your bank, in your San Francisco, in the mines 
of California, that shall buy a Spanish gentleman. When I leave, I 
leave the stock at my back; I shall take it, nevarre!" Then the banker 
he say, "And you will go and blab, I suppose?" And then, Paneho, I 
smile, I pick up my mustache — so! and I say: "Pardon, sefior, you 
haf mistake. The Saltillo haf for three hundred year no stain, no 
blot upon him. Eet is not now — the last of the race — who shall con- 
fess that he haf sit at a board of disgrace and dishonor !" And then it 



82 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

is that the band begin to play, and the animals stand on their hind legs 
and waltz, and behold, the row he haf begin. 

It is the atmosphere of romance, for the mine which had caused 
all the trouble had been in the family three hundred years and 
it had become a part of the family itself. When it passed 
into the hands of the new regime, when his wife, who also 
was of the new regime, deserted him, then passed Enriquez. 
The earth that for three hundred years had borne his fathers 
opened at the earthquake and took him to herself. It was the 
conception of a true romancer. The work of Bret Harte opened 
and closed with a vision of romance, a vision worthy even of a 
Hawthorne. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bret Haete. (1839-1902.) The Lost Galleon and Other Tales [Poems], 
1867; Condensed Novels and Other Papers, 1867; The Luck of Roaring 
Camp and Other Sketches, 1870; Plain Language from Truthful James, 
1870; The Pliocene Snull, 1871; Poems, 1871; East and West Poems, 1871; 
The Heathen Chinee and Other Poems, 1871; Poetical Works, 1872; Mrs. 
Skagg's Husbands, 1873; M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain, 1873; Echoes 
of the Foot-Hills [Poems], 1875; Tales of the Argonauts, 1875; Gabriel 
Conroy, 1:876; Two Men of Sandy Bar, 1876; Thankful Blossom, 1877; The 
Story of a Mine, 1878; Drift from Two Shores, 1878; The Tiovns of Table 
Mountain, 1879; Works in five volumes, 1882; Flip, and Found at Blazing 
Star, 1882; In the Carquinez Woods, 1884; On the Frontier, 1884; Maruja, 
1885; By Shore and Sedge, 1885; Snoio Bound at Eagle's, 1885; A Million- 
aire of Rough-and-Ready, 1887; The Crusade of the Excelsior, 1887; The 
Argonauts of North Liberty, 1888; A Phyllis of the Sierras, 1888; Cressy, 
1889; The Heritage of Dedloto Marsh, 1889; A Waif of the Plains, 1890; 
A Wa7-d of the Golden Gate, 1890; A Sappho of Green Springs, 1891; 
Colonel Starbottle's Client, 1892; A First Family of Tasajara, 1892; Susy: 
a Story of the Plains, 1893; Sally Doios and Other Stories, 1893; A Pro- 
tege of Jack Hamlin's, 1894; The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, 1894; In a Hol- 
low of the Hills, 1895; Clarence, 1895; Barket^s Luck, 1896; Three Part- 
ners, 1897; Tales of Trail and Town, 1898; Stories in Light and Shadow, 
1898; Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation, 1899; From Sandhill to Pine, 1900; 
Under the Redwoods, 1901; Openings in the Old Trail, 1902; Life of Bret 
Harte, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903; Bret Harte, by Henry W. Boynton, 
1905; The Life of Bret Harte with Some Account of the California Pion- 
eers, by Henry Childs Merwin, 1911. 



CHAPTER V 

THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 

The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Sted- 
man, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The 
movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, 
as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took 
possession of French art ; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught 
the ear of England; Bjomson made the discovery that in the 
Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse 
spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the 
old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant 
and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild 
and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The 
effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of 
the mid-century annual, Keatsism, Hyperionism, Heineism, had 
culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang 
of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown. 

In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled 
the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine 
laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio 
and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they 
were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by 
accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike, — 
strange creature to inspire a new literature. 



America has evolved four tj^pes, perhaps five, that are unique 
"new birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Ilosea Biglow 
and Sam Lawson variety ; the frontiersman and scout exemplified 
in Leather Stocking; the Southern "darky" as depicted by Rus- 
sell, Harris, Page, and others; the circuit rider of the frontier 
period ; and the Pike. 



84 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

"A Pike," says Bayard Taylor, "in the California dialect, is a native 
of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern lUinois. The first 
emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; 
but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for 
this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.' Besides, 
the emigrants from the aforementioned localities belonged evidently to 
the same genus, and the epithet 'Western' was by no means sufficiently 
descriptive. . . . He is the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism. 
He is long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates vehemently; he takes 
naturally to whisky; he has the 'shakes' his life long at home, though 
he generally manages to get rid of them in California; he has little 
respect for the rights of others; he distrusts men in 'store clothes,' but 
venerates the memory of Andrew Jackson." ^ 

Although he had not yet been named, the Pike had already 
figured in American literature. George W. Harris had pub- 
lished in 1867 Sut Lovengood's Yarns, a true piece of Pike litera- 
ture; Longstreet had drawn the type with fidelity in Georgia 
Scenes, Baldwin's Flush Times, and the sketches of such ephem- 
eral writers as Madison Tensas, Sol Smith, T. W. Lane, T. A. 
Burke, and J. L. McConnel, the author of Western Characters, 
had drawn the first broad outlines. In all this work he was 
simply the crude, uncouth Westerner, the antithesis of the man 
of the East. 

The first to discover him in his California phase and to affix 
to him for the first time in any book of moment the name Pike 
was "John Phoenix" who in Phwnixiana drew, as we have seen, 
a sketch which has scarcely been improved upon by later writers. 
It was not until 1871, however, that the name Pike and the 
peculiar type denoted by the name became at all known to the 
reading public. 

The instant and enormous vogue of Pike literature came almost 
by accident. Bret Harte late in the sixties had dashed off in a 
happy moment a humorous account of an attempt made by two 
California gamblers to fleece an innocent Chinaman who turned 
out to be anything but innocent. He had entitled the poem 
"Plain Language from Truthful James" and had thrown it 
aside as a trifle. Some months later during the last exciting 
moments before going to press with an edition of the Overland 
Monthly it was discovered that the form was one page short. 
There was nothing ready but this poem, and with misgivings 

y At Home and Airoad, Second Series, 51. 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 85 

Harte inserted it. The result was nothing less than amazing. 
It proved to be the most notable page in the history of the maga- 
zine. The poem captured the East completely ; it was copied and 
quoted and laughed at in every corner of the country. It swept 
through England and beyond. The Luck of Roaring Camp and 
the two or three strong pieces that followed it had given Harte 
a certain vogue in the East, but now he swiftly became not only 
a national, but an international figure. The fame of the 
"Heathen Chinee," as the poem was now called, brought out of 
obscurity other poems written by Harte during his editorial 
days, among them "The Society upon the Stanislaus," and it 
gave wings to other verses that he now wrote in the "Heathen 
Chinee" meter and stanza — "Dow's Flat" and "Penelope." 
Quickly there were added ' ' Jim, " " Chiquita, " " In the Tunnel, ' ' 
and "Cicely," all of them dealing not with the "heathen Chinee" 
of his first great strike, but with that other picturesque figure of 
early California, the Pike. 

It was gold, — in the quartz. 

And it ran all alike; 
And I reckon five oughts 
Was the worth of that strike ; 
And that house with the coopilow 's his'n, — which the same 
is n't bad for a Pike. 

These poems with others were published in 1871 with the title 
East and West Poems. The Pike County pieces in the volume 
number altogether seven; John Hay's Pike County Ballads, 
which came out in book form at almost the same moment, num- 
bered six — thirteen rather remarkable poems when one considers 
the furore that they created and the vast influence they exerted 
upon their times. 

For a decade and more Pike County colored American litera- 
ture. In 1871 J. G. Holland summed up the situation : 

The "Pike" . . . has produced a strange and startling sensation in 
recent literature. . . . With great celerity he has darted through the 
columns of our newspapers, the pages of our magazines, while quiet, 
well-behaved contributors have stood one side and let him have his own 
wild way. And it began to seem, at one time, as if the ordinary, decent 
virtues of civilized society could stand no chance in comparison with 
the picturesque heroism of this savage in dialect.^ 

^Scribner's Monthly, 2:430. 



86 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Much of Harte's fiction deals with this type. Save for Yuba 
Bill, who was evidently a Northerner, the New Orleans gamblers 
like Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin, and the Spanish and Mexican 
natives, his characters were prevailingly Pikes. The dialect in all 
of his work is dominated by this Southwestern element. In The 
New Assistant at the Pine Clearing School, for instance, the 
leader of the strike discourses like this: "We ain't hankerin' 
much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don't want 
no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the 
mo'nin'. We ain't Boston — We 're Pike County — we are." 
Tennessee's Partner was a Pike, and Uncle Jim and Uncle 
Billy, and Kentuck and Sandy — glorified to be sure and trans- 
formed by California and the society of the mines, but none the 
less Pikes. 

Following Harte and Hay came the outburst of local color 
fiction. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Cape Cod Folks, Sam Law- 
son's Fireside Stories, Hoosier Mosaics, Deephaven, Old Creole 
Days, In the Tennessee Mountains were but the beginning. For 
two decades and more American fiction ran to the study of local 
types and peculiar dialect. The movement was not confined to 
prose. The Pike County balladry was continued by Sidney 
Lanier and Irwin Russell with their songs and ballads of the 
negro quarters. Will Carleton with his fai-m ballads, James Whit- 
comb Riley with his Hoosier studies, Drummond with his tales of 
the ' ' Habitant ' ' of the Canadian frontier, and by Eugene Field, 
Sam Walter Foss, Holman F. Day, and scores of others down to 
Robert W. Service, the depicter of the Yukon and the types of 
the later gold rush. 

II 

Whether the Pike County balladry began with Bret Harte or 
with John Hay, is a question at present unsettled. Mark Twain 
was positive that Hay was the pioneer. His statement is im- 
portant : 

"It was contemporaneously supposed," he wrote after Hay's death, 
"that the Pike County Ballads were inspired or provoked by the Pike 
County balladry of Bret Harte, and they were first accepted as imita- 
tions or parodies. They were not written later, they were written 
(and printed in newspapers) earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself — 
in 1870 or '71, I should say. I believe — indeed, I am quite sure — that 
he added that the newspapers referred to were obscure western back- 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 87 

woods journals and that the ballads were not widely copied. Also he 
said this: That by and by, when Hai-te's ballads began to sweep the 
country, the noise woke his (Hay's) buried waifs and they rose and 
walked." ^ 

To this testimony may be added Howells's belief that Hay's 
ballads were prior to Harte 's and that ' ' a comparative study will 
reveal their priority,"* and the statement of W. E. Norris, a 
schoolmate of the poet, that "the ballads appeared as fugitive 
pieces in the newspapers, as I remember, and the attention they 
attracted induced the author to compile them with others in 
book form. ' ' ^ 

A comparative study of the poems certainly reveals the fact 
that one set was influenced by the other. ' ' Cicely ' ' and ' ' Little 
Breeches" have very much in common. They are in the same 
meter, and in one place they have practically identical lines : 

But I takes mine straight without sugar, and that's what's the mat- 
ter of me. — Cicely. 

I want a chaw of terbacker, 

And that 's what 's the matter with me. 

— Little Breeches. 

There are similarities in others of the poems: 

Don't know Flynn, — 

riynn of Virginia, — 

Long as he 's been 'yar ? 

Look 'ee here, stranger, 

Whar Jiev you been? — In the Tunnel. 

Whar have you been for the last three year. 

That you have n't heard folks tell 
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks 

The night of the Prairie Belief — Jim Bludso. 

It must be confessed that a study of the ballads and of the 
other poetical works of the two poets leaves one with the impres- 
sion that Harte was first in the field. Hay's six Pike County 
ballads stand isolated among his poems. Everything he wrote 
before them and after them is in an utterly different key. One 
feels as he reads him straight through — the earlier lyrics, Cas- 

s Harper's Weekly, 49:530. 

* North American Review, 181:343. 

^Century Magazine, 78:444. 



88 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

tilian Days, the later lyrics, The Bread-winners, The Life of 
Lincoln — that these poems came from an impulse, that they 
must have been thrown off in quick succession all at one time in 
answer to some sudden impression. One feels, therefore, more 
like trusting a contemporary biographical sketch than the un- 
supported impressions of contemporaries thirty years after the 
event. A sketch of John Hay, written by Clarence King in 
April, 1874, records that when Hay returned from Spain in 
1870 

All the world was reading Mr. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" and 
Mr. Hay did what all the world was doing. . . . He read all the poems, 
but "Chiquita" and "Cicely," which gave him particular pleasure, puz- 
zled him and set him to thinking. . . . He saw how infinitely nobler 
and better than nature they were, but, having been born and brought 
up as a Pike himself, he saw that they were not nature. He wrote 
"Little Breeches" for his own amusement — at least we have heard this 
is his account of the matter — to see how a genuine Western feeling ex- 
pressed in genuine Western language, would impress Western people. 
. . . The ballads were written within a few days of each other: two 
of them in a single evening.^ 

This seems all the more reasonable after we have considered 
Hay's earlier poetic ideals. He had been born into a refined 
home in the middle West, the son of a doctor and a New England 
mother, and he had grown up amid books and intellectual ideals. 
At the age of thirteen he had been sent to his uncle in Pike 
County, Illinois, to attend a private school which proved to be 
of such excellent quality that three years later he was prepared 
to enter the Sophomore class at Brown. His life at Providence 
awakened within him new ideals. He was invited into the lit- 
erary circle of the little city where he came to know Mrs. Whit- 
man, whose life at one time had touched that of Poe, and more 
significant still, Nora Perry, the poet, a kindred soul. Grad- 
uating at nineteen, the poet of his class, he went back to Warsaw, 
the little Mississippi River town of his boyhood, dreaming the 
dreams of a poet. But the outlook for the young dreamer was a 
depressing one. " I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere, ' ' 
he wrote to Miss Perry. In the West, "I find only a dreary- 
waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities 
may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of 

e Scribner's Monthly, 7:736. 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 89 

existence inevitably droop and wither. ' ' ^ He wrote much poetry 
during this early period — translations of Heine, Longfellow- 
like poems of beauty, and stirring lyrics to ]\Iiss Perry, who kept 
alive his poetic dreams with letters and poems, among them her 
"After the Ball" which she had shown him before it appeared 
in the Atlantic. No Pike County notes in this period: he was 
filled with the vision that even then was inspiring the little 
transition school of poets struggling along the old paths : Sted- 
man, Stoddard, Aldrich, Hayne, Sill, and the others. 

But there was no place in the young West for such dreams. 
He burned much of the poetry he had written and set out sternly 
to study law in his uncle 's office. ' ' I feel that Illinois and Rhode 
Island are entirely antipathetic," he confessed to Miss Perry. 
Within him he felt the fires even of genius, he wrote, "but when 
you reflect how unsuitable such sentiments are to the busy life 
of the Mississippi Valley, you may imagine then what an over- 
hauling I must receive — at my own hands too. There is, as yet, 
no room in the West for a genius. ' ' ^ 

No more poetry. He turned from it out of sheer sense of 
duty and began with the law. But he was to be no lawyer. In 
his uncle's office in Springfield he came into intimate contact 
with Lincoln, and before his law studies had matured at all, he 
found himself in Washington, the assistant secretary of the new 
President. Poetry now was out of the question. The war took 
his every moment, and after the war there was diplomatic 
service abroad, at Paris, at Vienna, at Madrid. The literary 
product of this latter period is as far from Pike work as 
Rhode Island was from Illinois. One may find it in the section 
of his poems headed "Wanderlieder" — beautiful lyrics of the 
Longfellow type — ' ' Sunrise in the Place de la Concorde, " " The 
Monks of Basle," "Ernst of Edelsheim," and the like. He 
brought with him too when he returned in 1870 his Spanish 
Sketch Book, Castilian Days, the work of a poet, golden atmos- 
phered, vivid, delightful. In the five years that followed on the 
Tribune staff he wrote for the magazines his best poems. He was 
a lyrist with a pen of gold, impassioned at times and impetu- 



fA Poet in Eanle. Early Letters of John Hay. Caroline Ticknor, 18. 
»Ibid., 24. 



90 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Roll on, shining sun, 

To the far seas, 
Bring down, ye shades of eve, 

The soft, salt breeze! 
Shine out, stars, and light 
My darling's pathway bright, 
As through the summer night 
She comes to me. 

And this entitled "Lacrimas": 

God send me tears! 
Loose the fierce band that binds my tired brain, 
Give me the melting heart of other years. 

And let me weep again! 



We pray in vain ! 
The sullen sky flings down its blaze of brass; 
The joys of life are scorched and withery pass: 

I shall not weep again. 

Strange company indeed for the Pike County poems. Hay 
himself was silent about the ballads ; he seemed reluctant to talk 
about them ; in later days we know he viewed them with regret. 

With Harte the problem is simpler. He wrote from the first 
all varieties of humorous verse : broad farce like the ' ' Ballad of 
the Emeu" and the ''California Madrigal"; rollicking parodies 
like "The Tale of a Pony," ''The Willows. After Edgar A. 
Poe," and "The Lost Tails of Miletus"; extravaganzas like "The 
Stage-Driver's Story" and "To the Pliocene Skull." His Pike 
verses are in full accord with the greater part of all he wrote 
both in verse and prose. They are precisely what we should 
expect from the author of the California Pike tales. That he 
was in one small part of his work an echo of Hay is exceedingly 
unlikely. If the Pike County Ballads were, as Mark Twain 
averred, first published in "obscure Western backwoods jour- 
nals" before "The Heathen Chinee" had appeared, the chances 
that Harte saw them are so small that it is hardly worth taking 
the time to consider them, especially when it is further averred 
that they "were not widely copied." At present the advantage 
is all with Harte; at present he may be hailed as the father of 
the Pike balladry and so of the realistic school of poetry in 
America. The question is not closed, however, nor will it be 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 91 

until the letters and journals of John Hay have been finally given 
to the world. 

Ill 

But even though the Pike County Ballads were not the first 
in the field, even though they were suggested by Harte's work, 
they were none the less valuable and influential. Hay wrote 
them from full experience. They rang true at every point as 
Harte's sometimes did not. Their author had lived from his 
third until his thirteenth year in full view of the Mississippi 
River; like Mark Twain he had played about the steamboat 
wharf, picking up the river slang and hearing the rude stories 
of the pilots and the deck hands. Warsaw, moreover, was on 
the trail of the Western immigration, a place where all the 
border types might be studied. Later, in Pittsfield, the county 
seat of Pike County, he saw the Pike at home untouched by con- 
tact with others — the Golyers, the Frys, the Shelbys, and all the 
other drinkers of ' ' whisky -skins. ' ' 

Hay has painted a picture not only of a few highly individ- 
ualized types ; he has drawn as well a background of conditions. 
He has made permanent one brief phase of middle Western 
history. It was this element of truth to nature — absolute real- 
ism — that gave the poems their vogue and that assured them per- 
manence. Harte's ballads were read as something new and as- 
tonishing and theatric; they created a sensation, but they did 
not grip and convince. Hay's ballads were true to the heart 
of Western life. 

The new literature of the period was influenced more by the 
Pike County Ballads than by the East and West Poems. The 
ballads were something new in literature, something certainly 
not Bostonian, certainly not English — something that could be 
described only as "Western," fresh, independent, as the Pike 
himself was new and independent among the types of humanity. 
John Hay was therefore a pioneer, a creator, a leader. His was 
one of those rare germinal minds that appear now and then to 
break into new regions and to scatter seed from which others are 
to reap the harvest. 



92 AMERICAN LITERATUEE SINCE 1870 



IV 

In the same remarkable year in which appeared East and 
West Poems and Pike County Ballads and so many other notable 
first volumes, there began in Hearth and Home Edward Eggles- 
ton's study of early Indiana life, entitled The Hoosier School- 
master. Crude as the novel is in its plot and hasty as it is in 
style and finish, it nevertheless must be numbered as the third 
leading influence upon the literature of the period. 

The extent to which it was influenced by Harte cannot be 
determined. The brother and biographer of the novelist insists 
that "the quickening influence that led to the writing of the 
story" was the reading of Taine's Art in the Netherlands. He 
further records that his brother one day said to him : 

"I am going to write a three-number story founded upon your ex- 
periences at Ricker's Ridge, and call it The Hoosier ScJioolmaster." 
Then he set forth his theory of art — that the artist, whether with pen 
or brush, who would do his best work, must choose his subjects from 
the life that he knows. He cited the Dutch painters and justified his 
choice of what seemed an unliterary theme, involving inide characters 
and a strange dialect perversion, by reference to Lowell's success with 
The Biglow Papers.^ 

If Eggleston was not influenced by Harte, then it is certain 
that he drew his early inspiration from the same fountain head 
as Harte did. Both were the literary offspring of Dickens. One 
cannot read far in The Hoosier Schoolmaster without recognizing 
the manner and spirit of the elder novelist. It is more prom- 
inent in his earlier work — in the short story. The Christmas Club, 
which is almost a parody, in the portraits of Shockey and Haw- 
kins and Miranda Means, and in the occasional moralizing and 
goody-goodiness of tone. 

There are few novelists, however, who contain fewer echoes 
than Eggleston. He was a more original and more accurate 
writer than Harte. We can trust his backgrounds and his pic- 
ture of society implicitly at every point. Harte had saturated 
himself Avith the fiction of other men; he had made himself an 
artist through long study of the masters, and he looked at his 
material always with the eye of an artist. He selected most 
carefully his viewpoint, his picturesque details, his lights and 

9 George Gary Eggleston's The First of the Hoosiers, 297. 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 93 

shadows, and then made his sketch. Eggleston, on the other 
hand, had made no study of his art. He had read almost no 
novels, for, as he expressed it, he was ''bred 'after the straitest 
sect of our religion' a Methodist." All he knew of plot con- 
struction he had learned from reading the Greek tragedies. 

His weakness was his strength. He silenced his conscience, 
which rebelled against novels, by resolving to write not fiction 
but truth. He would make a sketch of life as it actually had 
been lived in Indiana in his boyhood, a sketch that should be as 
minute in detail and as remorselessly true as a JMillet painting. 
It was not to be a novel; it was to be history. "No man is 
worthy," he declared in the preface to The Circuit Rider, "to be 
called a novelist who does not endeavor with his whole soul to 
produce the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as 
they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life that come 
within his scope." 

When Eggleston, later in his life, abandoned fiction to become 
a historian, there was no break in his work. He had always been 
a historian. Unlike Harte, he had embodied in his novels only 
those things that had been a part of his own life ; he had written 
with loving recollection; he had recorded nothing that was not 
true. He had sought, moreover, to make his novels an interpre- 
tation of social conditions as he had known them and studied 
them. "What distinguishes them [his novels]," he once wrote, 
"from other works of fiction is the prominence which they give 
to social conditions; that the individual characters are here 
treated to a greater degree than elsewhere as parts of a study 
of society — as in some sense the logical result of the environ- 
ment."^" 

Novels like The End of the World and The Circuit Rider are 
in reality chapters in the history of the American people. They 
are realistic studies, by one to the manner born, of an era in our 
national life that has vanished forever. 



Edward Eggleston was bom in Vevay, Indiana, December 10, 
1837. His father, a member of an old Virginia family, after 
a brilliant course at William and Mary College, had migrated 

I" Forum, 10:286, 



94 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

westward, settled in Indiana, and just as he was making himself 
a notable figure in the law and the politics of his State, had 
died when his eldest son, Edward, was but nine years old. The 
son had inherited both his father's intellectual brilliancy and his 
frail physique. Though eager for knowledge, he was able all 
through his boyhood to attend school but little, and, though his 
father had provided for a college scholarship, the son never 
found himself able to take advantage of it. He was largely self- 
educated. He studied whenever he could, and by making use 
of all his opportunities he was able before he was twenty to 
master by himself nearly all of the branches required for a col- 
lege degree. 

His boyhood was a wandering one. After the death of his 
father, the family removed to New Albany and later to Madison. 
At the age of thirteen he was sent to southern Indiana to live 
with an uncle, a large landowner, and it was here in the lowlands 
of Decatur County that he had his first chance to study those 
primitive Hoosier types that later he was to make permanent in 
literature. Still later he lived for a year and a half with his 
father's people in Virginia. 

Before he was nineteen he had chosen his profession. The 
tense Methodist atmosphere in which he had been reared had 
had its effect. He would be a preacher, a circuit rider, one of 
those tireless latter-day apostles that had formed so picturesque 
a part of his boyhood. "How did he get his theological educa- 
tion ? It used to be said that Methodist preachers were educated 
by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew ; but besides 
this oral instruction [he] carried in his saddle bags John Wes- 
ley's simple, solid sermons, Charles "Wesley's hymns, and a 
Bible." ^^ 

Eggleston's saddle bags contained far more than these. He 
read Whitfield and Thomas a Kempis, the CEdipus Tyrannus in 
the Greek, and all the history and biography that he could buy 
or borrow. His ''appointment" was in southeastern Indiana, a 
four-weeks' circuit with ten preaching places far apart in the 
Ohio River bottoms with their scattering population of malarial 
Pikes and their rude border civilization. He began his work 
with enthusiasm. He lived with his people; he entered inti- 
mately into their affairs ; he studied at first hand their habits of 

11 The Circuit Rider, Chap. XX. 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 95 

life and of thought. It was an ideal preparation for a novelist., 
but the rough life was in no way fitted for his frail physique. 
After six months he broke down almost completely and was sent 
into the pine forests of Minnesota to recuperate. For several 
years he was connected with the Minnesota conference. He held 
pastorates in St. Paul and other places, but his health still con- 
tinuing precarious, he at length retired to Chicago as an editor 
of the Little Corporal, a juvenile paper later merged in St. 
Nicholas. This step turned his attention to literature as a pro- 
fession. From Chicago he was called to Brooklyn to the staff of 
the Independent, of which he later became the editor, and the 
rest of his life, save for a five years' pastorate in Brooklyn, he 
devoted to literature. 

VI 

The Western novels of Edward Eggleston are seven in num- 
ber. One of them, The Mystery of Metropolisville, deals with 
frontier life in Minnesota, a stirring picture of a vital era ; all the 
others are laid in Indiana or eastern Ohio in that malarial, river- 
bottom. Pike area that had been familiar to his boyhood. Two 
of them are historical novels: The Circuit Rider, which deals 
with Indiana life during the early years of the century before the 
War of 1812, and The Graysons, a stirring tale involving Abra- 
ham Lincoln, who had lived in the State from 1816 to 1830. The 
End of the World described the Millerite excitement of Eggles- 
ton 's early boyhood; the others. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Boxy, 
and The Hoosier Schoolboy, were studies of sections of life that 
he had known intimately. One other novel he wrote, The Faith 
Doctor, the scene of which is laid in New York, and many short 
stories and juveniles. 

The atmosphere and the characters of these Western stories 
strike us as strangely unreal and exaggerated to-day. In his short 
story. The Gunpowder Plot, Eggleston complained that ''when- 
ever one writes with photographic exactness of frontier life he 
is accused of inventing improbable things." It seems indeed 
like a world peopled by Dickens, these strange phantasmagoria, 
"these sharp contrasts of corn-shuckings and camp-meetings, of 
wild revels followed by wild revivals; these contrasts of high- 
wayman and preacher; this melange of picturesque simplicity, 
grotesque humor, and savage ferocity, of abandoned wickedness 



96 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and austere piety. ' ' ^^ But grotesque and unreal as it is, it is 
nevertheless a true picture of the West in which Lincoln spent 
his boyhood. Every detail and every personage in all the novels 
had an exact counterpart somewhere in that stirring era. 

The novelist, however, is not content with a mere graphic 
picture. He is a philosopher. The Circuit Rider, for instance, 
the most valuable study in the series, brings home to the reader 
the truth of the author's dictum that "Methodism was to the 
West what Puritanism was to New England." "In a true pic- 
ture of this life," he adds, "neither the Indian nor the hunter 
is the center-piece, but the circuit rider. More than any one else, 
the early circuit preachers brought order out of this chaos. In 
no other class was the real heroic element so finely displayed. ' ' 

The figure of the circuit rider as he strides through the book, 
thundering the "Old Homeric epithets of early Methodism, ex- 
ploding them like bomb-shells — 'you are hair-hung and breeze- 
shaken over hell, ' ' ' has almost an epic quality. ' ' Magruder was 
a short stout man, with wide shoulders, powerful arms, shaggy 
brows, and bristling black hair. He read the hymns two lines 
at a time, and led the singing himself. He prayed with the 
utmost sincerity, but in a voice that shook the cabin windows and 
gave the simple people a deeper reverence for the dreadfulness 
of the preacher's message." 

It was his business to preach once or twice a day and three 
times on the Sabbath in a parish that had no western bounds. 
He talked of nothing but of sin and wrath and judgment to come. 
His arrival in the settlement cast over everything an atmosphere 
of awe. He aroused violent antagonisms. The rough element 
banded together to destroy his influence. They threatened him 
with death if he entered certain territory, but he never hesi- 
tated. He could fight as well as he could pray. They would 
fall broken and bruised before his savage onslaught and later 
fall in agony of repentance before his fiery preaching. His ser 
mens came winged with power. 

He hit right and left. The excitable crowd swayed with consterna- 
tion, as in a rapid and vehement utterance, he denounced their sins, 
with the particularity of one who had been familiar with them all his 
life. . . . Slowly the people pressed forward off the fences. All nt 
once there was a loud bellowing cry from some one who had fallen 

12 Preface to The Circuit Rider. 



THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY 97 

prostrate outside the fence, and who began to cry aloud as if the por- 
tals of an endless perdition were yawning in his face. . . . This out- 
burst of agony was fuel to the flames, and the excitement now spread 
to all parts of the audience. . . . Captain Lumsden . . . started for 
his horse and was seized with that curious nen^ous affection which 
originated in these religious excitements and disappeared with them. 
He jerked violently — his jerking only adding to his excitement. 

Eggleston has caught with vividness the spirit of this heroic 
age and brought it to us so that it actually lives again. The 
members of the conference at Hickory Ridge have gathered to 
hear the bishop read the appointments for the year : 

The brethren, still in sublime ignorance of their destiny, sang fer- 
vently that fiery hymn of Charles Wesley's: 

Jesus, the name high over all, 

In hell or earth or sky, 
Angels and men before him fall. 
And devils fear and fly. 

And when they reached the last stanzas there was the ring of soldiers 
ready for battle in their martial voices. That some of them would die 
from exposure, malaria, or accident during the next year was prob- 
able. Tears came to their eyes, and they involuntarily began to grasp 
the hands of those who stood next to them as they approached the 
chmax of the hymn. , . . 

Happy if with my latest breath 

I may but gasp His name, 
Preach Him to all, and cry in death, 

" Behold, behold the Lamb ! " 

Then, with suffused eyes, they resumed their seats, and the venerable 
Asbury, with calmness and a voice faltering with age, made them a 
brief address: 

"General Wolfe," said the British Admiralty, "will you go and take 
Quebec?" "I'll do it or die," he replied. Here the bishop paused, 
looked round about upon them, and added, with a voice full of emo- 
tion, "He went and did both. We send you first to take the country 
allotted to you. We want only men who are determined to do it or die ! 
Some of you, dear brethren, will do both. If you fall, let us hear that 
you fell like Methodist preachers at your post, face to the foe, and the 
shout of victory on your lips !" 

The effect of this speech was beyond description. There were sobs, 
and cries of "Amen," "God grant it," "Hallelujah !" from every part 
of the old log church. Every man was ready for the hardest place, if 
he must. 

With the circuit rider Eggleston undoubtedly added another 
type to the gallery of American fiction. 



98 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 



VII 

The novels of Eggleston have not the compression, the finish, 
the finesse of Harte's. Some of his works, notably The Hoosier 
Schoolmaster, were written at full speed with the press clatter- 
ing behind the author. Often there is to the style a mawkish 
Sunday-school juvenile flavor. There is often a lack of art, of 
distinction, of constructive skill. But there are compensations 
even for such grave defects. There is a vividness of character- 
ization and of description that can be compared even with that of 
Dickens; there is the ability to sketch a scene that clings to the 
memory in all its details. The trial scene in The Graysons is not 
surpassed for vividness and narrative power in any novel of the 
period. And, finally, there is a realism in background and atmos- 
phere that makes the novels real sources of history. 

The influence of Eggleston's work was enormous. He helped 
to create a new reading public, a public made up of those who, 
like himself, had had scruples against novel reading. He was an 
influence in the creating of a new and healthy realism in America. 
What Hay was to the new school of local color poets, Eggleston 
was to the new school of novelists. Harte was a romanticist; 
Eggleston was a realist. From Harte came the first conception 
of a new and powerful literature of the West. Eggleston was 
the directing hand that turned the current of this new literature 
into the channel of realism. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

John Hay. (1838-1905.) The Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces, 
(167 pages), 1871; Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle, and Little Breeches, 
illustrated by Eytinge (23 pages), 1871; Castilian Days, 1871; The Bread- 
winners, 1883; Poems by John Hay, 1890 and 1899; A Poet in Exile: 
Early letters of John Hay. Edited by Caroline Ticknor, 1910. 

Edward Eggleston. (1837-1902.) Mr. Blake's Walking-Stick, 1870; 
The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 1871; The End of the World, 1872; The Mystery 
of Metropolismlle, 1873; The Circuit Rider, 1874; The Schoolmaster's 
Stories, 1874; Roxy, 1878; The Hoosier Schoolboy, 1883; Queer Stories, 
1884; The Graysons, 1888; The Faith Doctor, 1891; Duffels (short stories), 
1893; The First of the Hoosiers, by George Gary Eggleston, 1903. 



CHAPTER VI 

JOAQUIN MILLER 

The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an on- 
looker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying 
their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of 
"copy"; but Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to 
have emerged from the materials he worked in. He could write 
in his later years, "My poems are literally my autobiography." 
"If you care to read further of my life, making allowance for 
poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally true." In 
some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte or 
Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has 
ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark 
Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are 
peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough first- 
hand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the 
making of the new West. He is the poet of the American west- 
ward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet 
preeminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua 
as John Muir is their prose interpreter. 



The life of Miller is a series of foot-notes to his poems. He 
was born on the line of the westward march. In the valuable 
autobiographical preface to the Bear edition of his poems he 
writes : ' ' My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was 
born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed 
the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." That was in 1841, and 
the name given him was Cincinnatus Hiner iMiller. His parents, 
like those of Mark Twain, were of that restless generation that 
could abide nowhere long, but must press ever on and on west- 
ward. His mother 's people had migrated from the Yadkin River 
country in North Carolina with the Boones, "devoted Quakers in 



100 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

search of a newer land"; his grandfather Miller was a Scotch- 
man, a restless pioneer who had fallen at Fort Meigs, leaving a 
family of small children to come up as they could in the wilder- 
ness. One of them, the father of the poet, picked up in a varied 
career along the border certain elements of book learning that 
enabled him to teach school in the settlement towns of Ohio and 
Indiana, 

The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land 
clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. 
Schooling he received at the hands of his father. The first book 
that he could remember was Fremont's Explorations, read aloud 
to the family by the fathei* until all knew it literally by heart, 
maps and all. Lured by its enthusiastic descriptions and by re- 
ports of a former pupil who had gone to Oregon and by the new 
act of Congress which gave to every homesteader six hundred and 
forty acres of land free, on March 17, 1852, with "two big heavily 
laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two 
horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three 
boys to ride," the family set out across the wild continent of 
America. ''The distance," he records, "counting the contours 
of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand 
miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were 
no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only 
the road as nature had made it. Many times, at night, after 
ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see 
our smoldering camp-fires of the day before." 

That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful 
dangers, its romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its 
constant demand for self-dependence, made an indelible impress 
on the young lad. It was a journey of Argonauts, one of the 
thousands of journeys that made picturesque a whole epoch. He 
has described it in some of the most stirring of his poems. All 
through his poetry occur stanzas like this : 

What strength! what strife! what rude unrest! 
What shocks! what half -shaped armies met! 
A mighty nation moving West, 
With all its steely sinews set 
Against the living forests. Hear 
The shouts, the shots of pioneer, 
The rending forests, rolling wheels. 
As if some half-checked army reels, 



JOAQUIN MILLER 101 

Recoils, redoubles, comes again, 
Loud-sounding like a hurricane. 

He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His dedi- 
catory preface to The Ship in the Desert, London, 1876, is a poem 
of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this : 

How dark and deep, how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty 
Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft the un- 
known domain of the middle world before us! Then the frail and 
buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, 
the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing cattle, 
the cows in the stormy stream eddying, whirling, spinning about, call- 
ing to their young, their bright horns shining in the sun. The wild 
men waiting on the other side; painted savages, leaning on their bows, 
despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on to the un- 
known distances, where they said the sun and moon lay down together 
and brought forth the stars. The long and winding lines of wagons, 
the gTaves by the wayside, the women weeping together as they passed 
on. Then hills, then plains, parched lands like Syria, dust and alkali, 
cold streams with woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles, 
tents in the center like Caesar's battle camps, painted men that passed 
like shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the hills. 

Two years with his parents on the new Oregon farm, and the 
lad ran away to the mines. "Go, I must. The wheels of the 
covered wagon in which I had been bom were whirling and 
whirling, and I must be off." For a time he was cook in a 
mining camp, but it was work impossible for a boy of thirteen, 
and soon he was on his wanderings again, first with one Ream, 
an adventurer, then with Mountain Joe, a trader in half-wild 
horses. He was drawn into Gibson's fight with the IModocs, was 
wounded frightfully by an arrow that pierced close to the base 
of the brain, and later was nursed back to life by a squaw who 
had adopted him in place of her son who had fallen in the battle. 
"Wlien the spring came and Mount Shasta stood out white and 
glorious above the clouds, I hailed him as a brother. ' ' And again 
he stole away and joined another band of Indians. "When the 
Modocs arose one night and massacred eighteen men, every man 
in the Pit River Valley, I alone was spared and spared only be- 
cause I was Los hoho, the fool. Then more battles and two more 
wounds." For a long time his mind was like that of a child. 
The Indians indeed, as he records, treated him "as if [he] had 
been newly born to their tribe." 



102 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me gold — 
from whence*? — and I being a "renegade," descended to San Francisco 
and set sail for Boston, but stoj^ped at Nicaragua with Walker. Thence 
up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough. I went home, went to 
college some, taught school some, studied law at home some; but ever 
and ever the lure of the mountains called and called, and I could not 
keep my mind on my books. But I could keep my mind on the perils 
I had passed. I could write of them, and I did write of them, almost 
every day. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde, Oregonian, Calif ornian, With 
Walker in Nicaragua — I had lived all these and more; and they were 
now a part of my existence. . . . Meantime I was admitted to the bar. 
Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and so on, and 
I was off like a rocket with the rest. 

To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices 
which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His 
father, it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the 
Scotch reverence for serious books and for education, and the 
boy's early schooling was not neglected. To say, on the other 
hand, as many, including the poet himself, have said, that he 
received a college education, is also to speak without knowledge. 
He did complete a course in Columbia University, Eugene, 
Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no way connected 
with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a mission 
school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according 
to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its 
instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its 
pupils through the first half of a high school course, and most 
of its pupils were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly 
early in the Civil-War period because of the active Southern 
sympathies of its president, who was himself very nearly the 
whole "university." It is significant that at almost the same 
time the Eugene Democratic Register edited by Miller was sup- 
pressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union. 

For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with 
diligence to books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has re- 
corded, "I have never since found such determined students 
and omnivorous readers. We had all the books and none of the 
follies of the great centers." The mania for writing had seized 
him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded the events 
of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned with 
his parental home in Oregon. ' ' The first thing of mine in print 
was the valedictory class poem, ' Columbia College. ' ' ' Undoubt- 



JOAQUIN MILLER 103 

edly during this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two 
brothers and my sister were by my side, our home with our par- 
ents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made 
ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers 
when not at college." 

Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic 
things that came from without, almost as from another world. 
Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the 
feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature 
and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the 
rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art : it became 
a religion. ''Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, 
''is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest 
declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the 
Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse 
continually — "I lived among the stars" — but he preserved of 
all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published 
in 1868 with the title Specimens. The next year he issued at 
Portland, Oregon, Joaquin et at, a book of one hundred and 
twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He 
addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his 
address sheds light upon the timid young poet : 

I am as one unlearned, uncouth. 
From country come to join the youth 
Of some sweet town in quest of truth, 

A skilless Northern Nazarine, 
From whence no good can ever come. 
I stand apart as one that 's dumb : 
I hope, I fear, I hasten home, 

I plunge into my wilds again. 

He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city 
of art and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for 
was he too not a bard ? Saj's Charles W. Stoddard, ' ' Never liad 
a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of th»t 
South Seas than that poet of the Sierra when he came to San 
Francisco in 1870."^ 

But the great Western city, as did New York a few months 
later, went on totally unaware of his advent. The bards even 
of San Francisco Bay did not come to the borders of the town to 

1 Exits and Entrances, 223. 



104 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

welcome the new genius. They seemed unaware of his pres- 
ence. Harte was inclined to be sarcastic, but finally allowed the 
Overland Monthly to say a word of faint praise for the young 
poet, despite what it termed his ' ' pawing and curvetting. " " His 
passion," it declared in a review written probably by Ina Cool- 
britli, "is truthful and his figures flow rather from his percep- 
tion than his sentiment." But that was all. He considered 
himself persecuted. His associates in the law had made fun of 
the legal term in the title of his book, had hailed him as "Joa- 
quin" Miller, and had treated Mm as a joke. "I was so unpop- 
ular that when I asked a place on the Supreme Bench at the 
Convention, I was derisively told: 'Better stick to poetry.' 
Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the 
grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of 
my fathers." He would support himself as Irving had sup- 
ported himself with his pen. He sought cheap quarters in the 
great city and began to write. February 1, 1871, he recorded 
in his diary: "I have nearly given up this journal to get out 
a book. I wanted to publish a great drama called 'Oregonian,' 
but finally wrote an easy-going little thing which I called 'Ara- 
zonian,' and put the two together and called the little book 
Pacific Poems. It has been ready for the printer a long time." 
He took the manuscript from publisher to publisher until, 
as he declares, every house in London had rejected it. His re- 
ception by Murray shows the general estimate of poetry by Lon- 
don publishers in the early seventies: 

He held his head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in, jerked 
his head back, looked in again, twisted his head like a giraffe, and 
then lifted his long finger: 

"Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, 
don't you knowf 

"But will you not read it, please?" 

"No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you know?" 

Then in desperation he printed a part of it at his own expense 
under the title Pacific Poems and sent out copies broadcast to 
the press. Never was venture so unpromising crowned with re- 
sults so startling. The little book was hailed everywhere as 
something remarkable. The St. James Gazette declared that 
the poem "Arazonian" — that was Miller's early spelling of the 
word — was by Browning. The new author was traced to his 



JOAQUIN MILLER 105 

miserable lodgings and made a lion of, and before the year was 
over the whole original manuscript of Pacific Poems had been 
brought out in a beautiful edition with the title Songs of the 
Sierras. Its author's real name did not appear upon the title 
page. The poems were by "Joaquin Miller," a name destined 
completely to supersede the more legal patronymic. ' ' The third 
poem in my first London book, ' ' he explains, ' ' was called ' Cali- 
fornia,' but it was called 'Joaquin' in the Oregon book. And 
it was from this that I was, in derision, called 'Joaquin.' I 
kept the name and the poem, too, till both were at least re- 
spected." ^ 

Few American books have been received by the English press, 
or any press for that matter, with such unanimous enthusiasm. 
Miller was the literary discovery of the year. The London 
Times declared the book the "most remarkable utterance Amer- 
ica has yet given"; the Evening Standard called it poetry "the 
most original and powerful." The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood 
counted its author as one of their own number, and gave him a 
dinner. Browning hailed him as an equal, and the press every- 
where celebrated him as "the Oregon Byron." The reason for 
it all can be explained best, perhaps, in words that W. M. Rossetti 
used in his long review of the poet in the London Academy: 
"Picturesque things picturesquely put . . . indicating strange, 
outlandish, and romantic experiences." The same words might 
have been used by a reviewer of Byron's first Eastern romance 
on that earlier morning when he too had awakened to find him- 
self famous. The book, moreover, was felt to be the promise of 
stronger things to come. "It is a book," continued Rossetti, 
' ' through whose veins the blood pulsates with an abounding rush, 
while gorgeous subtropical suns, resplendent moons, and abash- 
ing majesties of mountain form ring round the gladiatorial hu- 
man life." 

II 

Of Miller's subsequent career, his picturesque travels, his 
log cabin life in Washington, D. C, his Klondike experiences 
and the like, it is not necessary to speak. There was always an 
element of the sensational about his doings and his equipment. 
To the majority of men he was a poseur and even a mountebank. 

2 Songs of the Sierras, Bear edition, 133. 



106 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

At times indeed it was hard for even his friends to take him 
with seriousness. How was one, for instance, to approach in seri- 
ous mood As It Was in the Beginning, 1903, a book twelve inches 
by five, printed on coarse manila wrapping stock, bound in thin 
yellow paper, and having on the cover an enormous stork hold- 
ing in his bill President Roosevelt as an infant? Those who 
were closest to him, however, are unanimous in declaring that all 
this eccentricity was but the man himself, the expression of his 
own peculiar individuality, and that he was great enough to rise 
above the conventionalities of life and be himself. C. W. Stod- 
dard, who of all men, perhaps, knew him most intimately in his 
earlier period, maintained that 

People who knew him wondered but little at his pose, his Spanish 
mantle and sombrero, his fits of abstraction or absorption, his old- 
school courtly air in the presence of women — even the humblest of the 
sex. He was thought eccentric to the last degree, a bundle of affecta- 
tions, a crank — even a freak. Now I who have known Joaquin Miller 
as intimately as any man could know him, know that these mannerisms 
are natural to him; they have developed naturally; they are his second 
nature.^ 

Hamlin Garland, Charles F. Lummis, and many others who 
have known the poet intimately have spoken in the same way. 
His mannerisms and his eccentric point of view arose from the 
isolation in which his formative years were passed, his ignorance 
of life, his long association with highly individualized men in the 
mines and the camps and the mountains, and his intimate knowl- 
edge of the picturesque Spanish life of Mexico and Central 
America. His education had been peculiar, even unique. "All 
that I am," he declares in 3Iy Own Story,* "or ever hope to be 
I owe them [the Indians] . I owe no white man anything at all." 
He had never been a boy, he was utterly without sense of humor, 
and he had a native temperament aside from all this, that was 
all his own — need we say more? 

s Exits and Entrances, 231. 

4 "My Life Among the Modocs, Unwritten History, Paquita, My Life 
Among the Indians, My Oicn Story^, or whatever other name enterprising 
or piratical publisliers, Europe or America, may have chosen to give the 
one prose book Mulford and I put out in London during the Modoc War." 
— Bear edition, iv: 169. 



JOAQUIN MILLER 107 

III 

When one approaches the poetry of Joaquin Miller, one is at 
first confused by the lavishness of it, the strength, and then 
swiftly the dreary weakness of it. It is like his own landscapes, 
abounding in vast barrens and flats, with here and there glimpses 
of glittering peaks and vast ranges, and now and then oases 
full of marvelous revel of color and strange birds and tropic 
flowers. Three-fourths of all he wrote is lifeless and worthless, 
but the other quarter is to American poetry what the Rockies 
are to the American landscape. Few poets have so needed an 
editor with courage to reject and judgment to arrange. Miller 
himself has edited his poems with barbarous savageness. He has 
not hesitated to lop off entire cantos, to butcher out the whole 
trunk of a poem, leaving only straggling and unrelated branches, 
to add to work in his early manner stanzas after his later ideals, 
and to revamp and destroy and cast utterly away after a fashion 
that has few precedents. He has done the work with a broad-ax 
when a lancet was needed. His editings are valuable, indeed, 
only in the new prose matter that he has added as foot-note and 
introduction. 

The key to Miller's poetry is an aphorism from his own pen: 
"We must, in some sort, live what we write if what we write is 
^o live." The parts of his work that undoubtedly will live are 
those poems that deal most closely with the material from which 
he sprang and of which his early life was molded. He is the 
poet of the frontier and of the great mid-century exodus across 
the Plains, Poems like "The Heroes of Oregon," and "Exodus 
for Oregon," are a part of the national history. They thrill at 
every point with reality and life. 

The Plains! the shouting drivers at the wheel; 

The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll 

Of wheels; the gxoan of yokes and grinding steel 

And iron chain, and lo ! at last the whole 

Vast line, that reach'd as if to touch the goal, 

Began to stretch and stream away and \^and 

Toward the west, as if with one control; 

Then hope loom'd fair, and home lay far behind; 

Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind. 

And again 



108 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Then dust arose, a long dim line like smoke 

From out of riven earth. The wheels went groaning by, 

Ten thousand feet in harness and in yoke, 

They tore the ways of ashen alkali, 

And desert winds blew sudden, swift and dry. 

The dust ! it sat upon and fill'd the train ! 

It seemed to fret and fill the very sky. 

Lo! dust upon the beasts, the tent, the plain, 

And dust, alas! on breasts that rose not up again. 

Pictures of the Plains, the Indian camp, the mine, the mountain, 
the herd, the trail, are to be found scattered everywhere in his 
work. One finds them in the most unlikely places — diamonds 
embedded often in whole acres of clay. In so unpromising a 
book as As It Was in the Beginning with its grotesque introduc- 
tion explaining in characteristic mixed metaphor that "When, 
like a sentinel on his watch tower, the President, with his divine 
audacity and San Juan valor, voiced the real heart of the Amer- 
icans against 'race suicide,' I hastened to do my part, in my 
own way, ill or well, in holding up his hands on the firing line" 
— even in this book one finds sudden flashes of truest poetry. 
He is describing winter on the Yukon. About him are an 
eager band of gold-seekers ready to press north: 

The siege of Troy knew scarce such men; 
The cowards had not voyaged then, 
The weak had died upon the way. 

He describes with realism the horrors and the beauties of the 
Arctic night, then at last the rising of the sun after the long 
darkness : 

Then glad earth shook her raiment wide. 
As some proud woman satisfied, 
Tiptoed exultant, till her form, 
A queen above some battle storm. 
Blazed with the glory, the delight 
Of battle with the hosts of night. 
And night was broken, light at last 
Lay on the Yukon. Night had past. 

In passages like these the imagination of the poet breaks out for 
a moment like the moon from dark clouds, but all too often 
it is only for a moment. 

He is the poet preeminently of the mountains of the North- 
west. The spell of them was on him as it was on John Muir. 
At times in their presence he bursts into the very ecstasy of 



JOAQUIN MILLER 109 

poetry ; sonorous rhapsodies and invocations in which he reaches 
his greatest heights: 

Sierras, and eternal tents 
Of snow that flash o'er battlements 
Of mountains! My land of the sun, 
Am I not true"? have I not done 
All things foi thine, for thee alone, 
sun-land, sea-land thou mine own? 

There is a sweep and vastness about him at his best that one 
finds in no other American poet. No cameo cutting for him, no 
little panels, no parlor decorations and friezes. His canvas is 
all out of doors and as broad as the continent itself : 

Oh, heart of the world's heart! West! my West! 
Look up ! look out ! There are fields of kine, 
There are clover-fields that are red as wine; 
And a world of kine in the fields take rest. 
And ruminate in the shade of the trees 
That are white with blossoms or brown with bees. 
There are emerald seas of com and cane; 
There are cotton fields like a foamy main. 
To the far-off South where the sun was born. 

The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his 
lines : 

Room ! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free, 
To grow to be giant, to sail as at sea 
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane 
To the wind, without pathway or route or a rein. 
Room ! room to be free where the white border'd sea 
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he; 
Where the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain, 
Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main, 
And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe 
Offers rest; and unquestion'd you come or you go. 
My plains of America ! Seas of wild lands ! 
From a land in the seas in a raiment of foam, 
That has reached to a stranger the welcome of home, 
I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands. 

Or again this magnificent apostrophe to the Missouri River : 

Hoar sire of hot, sweet Cuban seas. 

Gray father of the continent, 
Fierce fashioner of destinies. 

Of states thou hast upreared or rent. 



110 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Thou know'st no limit; seas turn back 

Bent, broken from the shaggy shore; 
But thou, in thy resistless track, 

Art lord and master evermore. 
Missouri, surge and sing and sweep ! 
Missouri, master of the deep. 
From snow-reared Rockies to the sea 
Sweep on, sweep on eternally! 

And grandest of all, the poem that has all America in it and the 
American soul, perhaps the grandest single poem of the period, 
"Columbus": 

Behind him lay the gray Azores, 

Behind the Gates of Hercules; 
Before him not the ghost of shores; 

Before him only shoreless seas. 
The good mate said : "Now must we pray, 

For lo ! the very stars are gone, 
Brave AdmVl speak; what shall I sayf" 
"Why, say : 'Sail on ! sail on ! and on !' " 

In his enthusiasm for the mountains and the American land- 
scape Miller was thoroughly sincere. Despite all his posturing 
and his fantastic costumes he was a truly great soul, and he spoke 
from his heart when he said in 1909: "But pity, pity, that 
men should so foolishly waste time with either me or mine when 
I have led them to the mighty heart of majestic Shasta. Why 
yonder, lone as God and white as the great white throne, there 
looms against the sapphire upper seas a mountain peak that 
props the very porch of heaven; and yet they bother with and 
want to torment a poor mote of dust that sinks in the grasses at 
their feet."^ 

IV 

This leads us to the second phase of Miller's personality: he 
was a philosopher, a ponderer upon the deeper things of the spirit. 
He had inherited with his Scotch blood a religious strain, and a 
large section of his poetry deals with regions far indeed from 
his Sierras. He has written much upon the common funda- 
mentals of humanity: religion, love, honor, courage, truth, and 
the like. In his ' ' Vale ! America, ' ' written in Italy during his 
second European sojourn, he could say, 

5 Bear edition, ii: 91. 



JOAQUIN MILLER 111 

I have lived from within and not from without, 

And again 

Could I but return to ray woods once more, 

And dwell in their depths as I have dwelt, 

Kneel in their mosses as I have knelt, 

Sit where the cool white rivers run, 

Away from the world and half hid from the sun. 

Hear winds in the wood of my storm-torn shore, 

To tread where only the red man trod, 

To say no word, but listen to God! 

Glad to the heart with listening — 

It seems to me that I then could sing, 

And sing as never sung man before. 

There was v^ithin him indeed something of the recluse and the 
hermit. No one of the period, not even Muir or Burroughs, ap- 
proached Nature with more of worship. He would live with her 
and make her central in every point of his life. In his later 
years he built him a cabin on the heights above San Francisco 
Bay with a tremendous outlook of sea and mountain and sky, and 
lived there the rest of his life. 

I know a grassy slope above the sea, 

The utmost limit of the westmost land. 

In savage, gnarl'd, and antique majesty 

The great trees belt about the place, and stand 

In guard, with mailed limb and lifted hand. 

Against the cold approaching civic pride. 

The foamy brooklets seaward leap; the bland 

Still air is fresh with touch of wood and tide. 

And peace, eternal peace, possesses, wild and wide. 

He became more and more solitary, more and more of a mys- 
tic as the years went on. Even from the first, as Rossetti pointed 
out, there is an almost oriental pantheism in him. It came per- 
haps from his Indian training. "Some curious specimens," 
Rossetti observed, "might be culled of the fervid interfusion of 
external nature and the human soul in his descriptive passages. 
The great factors of the natural world — the sea, the mountains, 
the sun, moon, and stars — become personalities, animated with 
an intense life and dominant possession." 

But Miller was by no means a satyr, as many have pictured 
him, delighting in wildness for the mere sake of wildness. He 
overflowed with humanity. No man was ever more sensitive or 



112 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

more genuinely sympathetic. In his later years he sat above 
the tumult a prophet and seer, and commented and advised 
and warned. Great areas of his poetry have nothing to do with 
the West, nothing at all with the manner and the material that 
are so naturally associated with his name. For decades his voice 
was heard wherever there was oppression or national wrong. 
He wrote sonorous lyrics for the Indians, the Boers, the Russian 
Jews; he wrote the ringing "Cuba Libre" which was read by 
the Baroness de Bazus in the leading American cities before the 
Spanish war; he championed the cause of woman; and every- 
where he took the side of the weaker against the strong. In this 
he resembles Mark Twain, that other prophet of the era. The 
freedom of the new West was in both of them, the true American 
' ' hatred of tyranny intense. ' ' He was won always by gentleness 
and beauty : he wrote a Life of Christ, he wrote The City Beauti- 
ful, and Songs of the Soul. 

But almost all that he wrote in this pet field of his endeavor 
perished with its day. Of it all there is no single poem that 
may be called distinctive. He moralizes, he preaches, he cham- 
pions the weak, but he says nothing new, nothing compelling. 
He is not a singer of the soul: he is the maker of resounding 
addresses to the peaks and the plains and the sea; the poet of 
the westward march of a people; the poet of elemental men in 
elemental surroundings — pioneers amid the vastness of the utter- 
most West. 



It is easy to find defects in Miller's work. Even the sophomore 
can point out his indebtedness to Byron and to Swinburne — 

The wine-dark wave with its foam of wool — 

his Byronic heroes and overdrawn heroines ; his diction excessive 
in alliteration and adjectives; his barbarous profusion of color; 
his overworking of the word "tawney"; his inability to tell a 
story ; his wordiness and ramblings ; his lack of distinctness and 
dramatic power. One sweeps away the whole of this, however, 
when one admits that three quarters of all that Miller wrote 
should be thrown away before criticism begins. 

The very faults of the poet serve as arguments that he was 



JOAQUIN MILLER 113 

a poet — a poet born, not a poet made from study of other poets. 
He was not classic : lie was romantic — a poet who surrendered 
himself to the music within him and did not care. "To me," 
he declared in his defense of poesy, "the savage of the plains 
or the negro of the South is a truer poet than the scholar of 
Oxford. They may have been alike born with a love of the 
beautiful, but the scholar, shut up within the gloomy walls, 
with his eyes to a dusty book, has forgotten the face of Nature 
and learned only the art of utterance. ' ' ® This is one of the 
keys to the new era that opened in the seventies. It explains 
the new laughter of the West, it explains the Pike balladry, 
it explains the new burst of democratic fiction, the studies of 
lowly life in obscure environments. "To these poets," he con- 
tinues; "these lovers of the beautiful; these silent thinkers; these 
mighty mountaineers, far away from the rush and roar of com- 
merce; these men who have room and strength and the divine 
audacity to think and act for themselves — to these men who dare 
to have heart and enthusiasm, who love the beautiful world that 
the Creator made for them, I look for the leaven of our loaf." 

Miller comes nearer to Llark Twain than to any other writer, 
unless it be John Muir. True, he is wholly without humor, true 
he had never been a boy, and in his mother's words had "never 
played, never had playthings, never wanted them"; yet notwith- 
standing this the two men are to be classed together. Both are 
the recorders of a vanished era of which they were a part; both 
emerged from the material which they used ; both wrote notable 
prose — Miller's Life Among the Modocs and his other auto- 
biographic picturings rank with Life on the Mississippi; both 
worked with certainty in one of the great romantic areas of 
human history. There is in the poems of Miller, despite all their 
crudity, a sense of adventure, of glorious richness, of activity in 
the open air, that is all his own. His Byronism and his Swin- 
burneism were but externals, details of manner: the song and 
the atmosphere about it were his own, spun out of his own ob- 
servation and colored by his own unique personality. 

His own definition of poetry determines his place among the 
poets and explains his message: "To me a poem must be a pic- 
ture," and it must, he further declared, be drawn always from 
Nature by one who has seen and who knows. ' ' The art of poetry 

6 The Independent, June, 1879. 



114 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

is found in books; the inspiration of poetry is found only in 
Nature. This book, the book of Nature, I studied in the wilder- 
ness like a monk for many years. ' ' The test of poetry, he main- 
tained, is the persistence with which it clings in the memory, 
not the words but the picture. Judged by this standard, Songs 
of the Sierras, which is a succession of gorgeous pictures that 
cling in the imagination, must rank high. 

It was his ideal to draw his generation away from their pursuit 
of gold and their slavery in the artificial round of the cities, their 
worship of European culture, European architecture, European 
books, and show them the beauties of their own land, the glories 
of the life out of doors, the heroism and sacrifice of the pioneers 
who made possible the later period. 

''Grateful that I was born in an age of active and mighty 
enterprise, and exulting, even as a lad, in the primitive glory 
of nature, wild woods, wild birds, wild beasts, I began, as my 
parents pushed west through the wilderness, to make beauty 
and grandeur the god of my idolatry, even before I yet knew the 
use of words. To give expression to this love and adoration, to 
lead others to see grandeur, good, glory in all things animate or 
inanimate, rational or irrational, was my early and has ever been 
my one aspiration." 

He would be the prophet of a new era. To the bards who 
are to come he flings out the challenge: "The Old World has 
been written, written fully and bravely and well. ... Go forth 
in the sun, away into the wilds, or contentedly lay aside your 
aspirations of song. Now, mark you distinctly, I am not writing 
for nor of the poets of the Old World or the Atlantic seaboard. 
They have their work and their way of work. My notes are for 
the songless Alaskas, Canadas, Californias, the Aztec lands and 
the Argentines that patiently await their coming prophets. ' ' ^ 

VI 

The treatment of Miller by his own countrymen has never 
been so laudatory as that accorded him by other lands, notably 
England, but his complaint that his own people neglected him 
is groundless. All the leading magazines — the Atlantic, Scrih- 
ner's, the Independent, and the rest — opened their columns to 

7 Bear Edition, iii : 33. 



JOAQUIN MILLER 115 

him freely. That reviews of his work and critical estimates of 
him generally were more caustic on this side the Atlantic came 
undoubtedly from the fact that the critic who was to review him 
approached his book always in a spirit of irritation at the British 
insistence that an American book to be worth the reading must 
be redolent of the wild and the uncouth, must deal with Indians, 
and buffaloes, and the various extremes of democracy. Miller has 
been the chief victim of this controversy — a controversy, indeed, 
which was waged through the whole period. The eccentricities of 
the man and his ignorance and his picturesque crudeness, set over 
against the extravagant claims of British writers, aroused pre- 
judices that blinded the American critic to the poet's real worth. 
On the whole the English have been right. Not that American 
literature to be of value must be shaggy and ignorant, a thing 
only of Pikes and slang and dialect. It means rather that the 
new period which opened in the seventies demanded genuine- 
ness, reality, things as they are, studies from life rather than 
studies from books; that it demanded not the reechoing of out- 
worn ideals and measures from other lands, but the spirit of 
America, of the new Western world, of the new soul of the new 
republic. And what poet has caught more of this fresh new 
America than the singer of the Sierras, the singer of the great 
American deserts, and the northern Yukon? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Joaquin Milleb. (1841-1913.) Specimens, 1868; Joaquin et al, 1869; 
Pacific Poems, 1870; Songs of the Sierras, 1871; Songs of the Sunlands, 
1873; Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs (with Percival Mul- 
ford), 1874; The Ship in the Desert, 1875; First Families of the Sierras, 
1875; Songs of the Desert, 1875; The One Fair Woman, 1876; The Baroness 
of Neio York, 1877; Songs of Italy, 1878; The Danites in the Sierras, 
1881; Shadows of Shasta, 1881; Poems, Complete Edition, 1882; Forty- 
nine: a California Drama, 1882; 'J/O: or, the Gold-seekers of the Sierras, 
1884; Mcmorie and Rime, 1884; The Destruction of Gotham, 1886; Songs 
of the Mexican Seas, 1887; In Classic Shades and Other Poems, 1890; 
The Building of the City Beautiful, a Poetic Romance, 1893; Songs of the 
Soul, 1896; Chants for the Boer, 1900; True Bear Stories, 1900; As It 
Was in the Beginning, 1903; Light: a Narrative Poem, 1907; Joaquin 
Miller's Poetry, Bear Edition, 1909. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE TRANSITION POETS 

The second generation of poets in America, those later singers 
born during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest 
books of the older school, began its work during the decade be- 
fore the Civil War. It was not a group that had been launched, 
as were the earlier poets of the century, by a spiritual and moral 
cataclysm, or by a new strong tide in the national life. It was 
a school of deliberate art, the inevitable classical school which 
follows ever upon the heels of the creative epoch. 

It came as a natural product of mid-century conditions. 
America, hungry for culture, had fed upon the romantic pabulum 
furnished so abundantly in the thirties and the forties. It looked 
away from the garish daylight of the new land of its birth into 
the delicious twilight of the lands across the sea, with their ruins 
and their legends and their old romance. 

We have seen how it was an age of sugared epithet, of ado- 
lescent sadness and longing, of sentiment even to sentimentality. 
Its dreams were centered in the East, in that old world over 
which there hung the glamour of romance. "I hungrily read," 
writes Bayard Taylor of this epoch in his life, "all European 
books of travel, and my imagination clothed foreign countries 
with a splendid atmosphere of poetry and art. . . . Italy! and 
Greece! the wild enthusiasm with which I should tread those 
lands, and view the shrines 'where young Romance and Love 
like sister pilgrims turn ' ; the glorious emotions of my soul, and 
the inspiration I should draw from them, which I now partly feel. 
How my heart leaps at the sound of : 

Woods that wave on Delphi's steep, 
Isles that gem the ^gean deep. 

The isles of Greece ! hallowed by Homer and Milton and Byron ! 
My words are cold and tame compared with my burning 
thoughts."^ 

1 Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, i : 35 

116 I 



THE TRANSITION POETS 117 

The increasing tide of translations that marked the thirties 
and the forties, the new editions of English and continental 
poets — Shelley, Keats, Heine ; the early books of the Victorians — 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the young Tennyson — came across 
the sea to these sensitive souls like visitants from another planet. 
"I had the misfortune," Taylor writes in 1848, "to be intoxi- 
cated yesterday — with Tennyson 's new poem, ' The Princess. ' . . . 
For the future, for a long time at least, I dare not read Tenny- 
son. His poetry would be the death of mine. His intense per- 
ception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it 
from me. ' ' - 

Poetry was a thing to be spoken of with awed lips like love 
or the deeper longings of the soul. It was an ethereal thing 
apart from the prose of life ; it was beauty, melody, divinest art 
— a thing broken into harshly by the daily round, a thing to be 
stolen away to in golden hours, as Stoddard and Taylor stole 
away on Saturday nights to read their poets and their own 
poems, and to lose themselves in a more glorious world. "My 
favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and we pretended 
to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to earth in 
our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent 
imitation of his diction ; my comrade 's worship of his master 
took the form of an ode to Shelley. ... It is followed in the 
volume before me by an airy lyric on ' Sicilian "Wine, ' which was 
written out of his head, as the children say, for he had no Sicilian 
wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage. ' ' ^ 

It explains the weakness of the whole school. All too often 
did these young poets of the second generation write from out 
their heads rather than their hearts. They were practitioners of 
the poetic art rather than eager workers in the stuff that is 
human life. They were inspired not by their times and the ac- 
tual life that touched elbows with theirs in their toil from day 
to day ; they were inspired by other singers. Poetry they wove 
from poetry ; words from words. Song begotten from other song 
perishes with its singer. To endure, poetry must come from 
"that inexpressible aching feeling of the heart" — from the im- 
pact of life upon life; it must thrill with the deepest emotions 
of its creator's soul as he looks beyond his books and all the 

^ Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, 1:119. 

3 R. H. Stoddard in The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1879. 



118 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

printed words of others into the yearning, struggling world of 
men. 



The members of this second generation of poets fall into two 
distinct groups: first, those who caught not at all the new note 
that came into American life and American literature after the 
war, and so, like the survivors of the earlier school, went on to 
the end only echoing and reechoing the earlier music; and, sec- 
ondly, those transitional poets who yielded to the change of times 
and retuned their instruments to the new key. Of the first 
group four only may be mentioned: Thomas Buchanan Read 
(1822-1872), George Henry Boker (1823-1890), Bayard Taylor 
(1825-1878), and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903). None 
of these may be called a poet of the transition ; none of these, not 
even Taylor, caught the new spirit of recreated America; none 
of them added to poetry any notes that have influenced the song 
or the life or the spirit of later years. They were poets of 
beauty without a message, and they caught no new vision of 
beauty. 

The work of the group began early, only a few years later than 
that of the major singers. Taylor's Ximena appeared in 1844; 
Boker 's Lesson of Life and Read's Poems in 1847; and Stod- 
dard's Footprints in 1849. By 1870 they had settled into their 
final manner. It was theirs to strike the last notes, ineffective 
and all too often decadent, of that mid-century music that had 
begun with Bryant and Foe, with Emerson and Whittier, with 
Willis and Longfellow. 

II 

We may pause a moment with Taylor. His personality in the 
early seventies undoubtedly was more potent in America than 
that of any other poet. His was the leading poetic voice of the 
Centennial of 1876, that great national gathering that marks in 
a way the birth of the new American spirit. 

But Taylor was not at all an original force. His power lay 
in his picturesque personality. His Macaulay-like memory 
charged with enormous store of literature from all lands and at 
instant command ; his bluff and hearty manner ; and the atmos- 
phere of romance which surrounded him, made him a marked man 



THE TRANSITION POETS 119 

wherever he went. He appealed to the imagination of adolescent 
America. Like Byron, he had traveled far in the mysterious 
East; there was the sensuousness and dreaminess of the Orient 
about him; he had ''ripened," as he expressed it, ''in the suns 
of many lands." 

The weakness of Taylor was the weakness of Stoddard, of 
Aldrich, of the early Stedman, of all the poets of beauty. They 
had drunk like the young Tennyson of the fatal draft of Keats. 
To them beauty concerned itself with the mere externals of sense. 
Keats is the poet of rich interiors, of costly hangings, and em- 
broidered garments. To read him is to come into the presence 
of rare wines, of opiates that lap one in long forgetfulness, of 
softly whispering flutes and viols, of rare tables heaped with 
luscious dainties brought from far, of all the golden East can 
bring of luxury of furnishings and beauty of form and color. 
"A thing of beauty," he sings, "is a joy forever," but beauty to 
Keats is only that which brings delight to the senses. Of beauty 
of the soul he knows nothing. His women are Greek goddesses : 
nothing more. In Keats, and later in his disciples, Taylor and 
Stoddard and Aldrich, we never come face to face with souls in 
conflict for eternal principles. Shelley looked at life about him 
and reacted upon it. He showed us Prometheus bound to the 
rock for refusal to yield to tyrannic law, and then liberated by 
the new soul of human love. He believed that he had a vision 
of a new heaven and earth with Reason as its god and Love its 
supreme soul, and he beat out his life in eagerness to bring men 
into this new heaven in the clouds. Keats reacted upon nothing 
save the material which he found in books : translations from the 
Greek, Spenser, Shakespeare, that earlier adolescent dreamer 
Marlowe, Milton, Coleridge. With the exception of hints from 
"Christabel" which we find worked into "The Eve of St. Agnes" 
and "Lamia," Keats never got nearer his own century than 
Milton's day. He turned in disgust from the England about 
him — that England with its Benthamite individualism, inherit- 
ance from the French Revolution, which even then was culmi- 
nating in all the misery and riot and civil strife that later we find 
pictured in the novels of Dickens and Kingsley — he turned from 
it to the world of merely sensuous delight, where selfishly he might 
bwoon away in a dream of beauty. 

Taylor and Stoddard and the early Aldrich reacted not at al! 



120 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

on the America that so sadly needed them. They added senti- 
ment to the music of Keats and dreamed of the Orient with its 
life of sensuous surfeit : 

The Poet came to the land of the East 

When spring- was in the air: 
The Earth was dressed for a wedding feast, 

So young she seemed and fair; 
And the Poet knew the land of the East — 

His soul was native there. 

And further sang the Nightingale: 

Your bower not distant lies. 
I hear the sound of a Persian lute 

From the jasmined window rise, 
And, twin-bright stars, through the lattice bars, 

I saw the Sultana's eyes. 

The Poet said: I will here abide, 

In the Sun's unclouded door; 
Here are the wells of all delight 

On the lost Arcadian shore: 
Here is the light on sea and land, 

And the dream deceives no more. 

"Taylor, Boker, Stoddard, Read, Story, and their allies," con- 
fessed Stedman in his later years, "wrote poetry for the sheer 
love of it. They did much beautiful work, with a cosmopolitan 
and artistic bent, making it a part of the varied industry of men 
of letters; in fact, they were creating a civic Arcadia of their 
own." * 

But in making this civic Arcadia of their own they deliberately 
neglected the opportunity of reacting upon the actual civic life 
of their own land in their own and later times. They lived in 
one of the great germinal periods in the history of the race and 
they deliberately chose to create a little Arcadia of their own. 

No man of the century, save Lowell, was given the opportunity 
to react upon the new world of America at a critical moment 
such as was given to Taylor at the Centennial in 1876. Subject 
and occasion there were worthy of a Milton. A new America had 
arisen from the ashes of the war, eager and impetuous. A new 
era had begun whose glories we of a later century are just be- 
ginning to realize. Who was to voice that era ? The land needed 

i An American Anthology. Introduction, xxvi. 



THE TRANSITION POETS 121 

a poet, a seer, a prophet, and in Taylor it had only a dreamer of 
beauty, gorgeous of epithet, musical, sensuous. "The National 
Ode," when we think of what the occasion demanded, must be 
classed as one of the greatest failures in the history of American 
literature. Freneau's "The Rising Glory of America," written 
in 1772, is an incomparably better ode. There are no lines in 
Taylor's poem to grip the heart and send the blood into quicker 
beat; there are no magnificent climaxes as in Lowell's odes: 

Virginia gave us this imperial man. 

Mother of States and undiminished men. 
Thou gavest us a country giving him. 

New birth of our new soil, the first American. 

There is excessive tinkling of rimes; there is forcing of meas- 
ures that could have come only of haste ; there is lack of incisive- 
ness and of distinctive poetic phrases that cling in the memory 
and become current coin ; there is lack of vision and of message. 
The poet of beauty was unequal to his task. There was needed 
a prophet and a creative soul, and the lack of such a leader at 
the critical moment accounts in part perhaps for the poetic lean- 
ness of the period that was to come. 



Ill 

The poets of the second group, the transition poets, for the most 
part were born during the thirties. Like Taylor and Stoddard, 
they were poets of beauty who read other poets with eagerness 
and wrote with deliberation. Their early volumes are full of ex- 
quisitely finished work modeled upon Theocritus and Heine, upon 
Keats and Shelley. They reacted but little upon the life about 
them ; they railed upon America as crude and raw, a land without 
adequate art, and were content to fly away into the world of 
beauty and forget. 

Then suddenly the war crashed in their ears. For the first 
time they caught a vision of life, of their country, of themselves, 
and for the first time they burst into real song. "For eight 
years," wrote the young Stedman in 1861, "I have cared nothing 
for politics — have been disgusted with American life and doings. 
Now for the first time I am proud of my country and my grand 



122 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

heroic brethren. The greatness of the crisis, the Homeric 
grandeur of the contest, surrounds and elevates us all. . . . 
Henceforth the sentimental and poetic will fuse with the intel- 
lectual to dignify and elevate the race." ^ 

Edmund Clarence Stedman was of old New England stock. 
He had inherited with his blood what Howells termed, in words 
that might have emanated from Dr. Holmes himself, ' ' the quality 
of Boston, the honor and passion of literature. ' ' He was born in 
Hartford, Connecticut, October 8, 1833. Bereft of his father 
when he was but two years of age, and later, when he was a mere 
child, forced to leave his mother and live with an uncle who could 
little supply the place that only father and mother can fill in a 
boy's life, he grew into a headstrong, moody youth who resented 
control. He was a mere lad of fifteen when he entered Yale, the 
youngest member indeed of his class, and his rustication two years 
later was only a natural result. Boyishness and high spirits and 
impetuous independence of soul are not crimes, however, and the 
college in later years was glad to confer upon him his degree. 

Returning to Norwich, the home of his uncle, he pursued for 
a time the study of law. Later he connected himself with the 
local newspaper, and in 1853, at the age of twenty, he was mar- 
ried. Two years later, he left newspaper work to become the 
New York representative of a firm which was to engage in the 
manufacture and sale of clocks. Accordingly in the summer of 
1855 he took up for the first time his residence in the city that was 
to be so closely connected with the rest of his life. 

The clock factory made haste to burn and Stedman again was 
out of employment, this time in the great wilderness of New York. 
For a time he was a real estate and commission broker, later he 
was a clerk in a railroad office. Still later he attracted wide 
attention with his ephemeral poem ''The Diamond Wedding," 
and on the strength of this work became a correspondent of the 
Tribune. In 1861 he went to the front as war correspondent of 
the Washington World, and his letters during the early years of 
the struggle were surpassed by those of no other correspondent. 
In 1862 he was given a position in the office of the Attorney- 
General and a year later he began his career as a broker in Wall 
Street, a career that was to hold him in its grip for the rest of 
his life. 

= Lt/e and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, i: 242. 



THE TRANSITION POETS 123 

Pan and Wall Street are far from synonymous. There was 
poetry in Stedman's soul; there were within hiin creative powers 
that he felt were able to place him among the masters if he could 
but command time to study his art. He worshiped beauty and 
he was compelled to keep his eye upon the stock-ticker. He read 
Keats and Tennyson, Moschus and Theocritus, but it was always 
after the freshness of his day had been given to the excitement 
of the market place. Time and again he sought to escape, but 
the pressure of city life was upon him. He had a growing fam- 
ily now and there were no resources save those that came from his 
office. It was a precarious business in which he engaged ; it was 
founded upon uncertainty; failure might come at any moment 
through no fault of his own. Several times during his life he 
was on the brink of ruin. Time and again his health failed him, 
but he still struggled on. The financial chapter of his biography 
is one of the most pathetic in literary annals. But through toil 
and discouragement, amid surroundings fatal to poetic vision, he 
still kept true to his early literary ideals, and his output when 
measured either in volumes or in literary merit is remarkable. 

The first period of Stedman's poetic life produced little save 
colorless, passionless lyrics, the echoes of a wide reading in other 
poets. He went, like all of his clan, to books rather than life. He 
was early enamoured of the Sicilian idylists. It was a dream that 
never quite deserted him, to make ''a complete, metrical, English 
version of the idyls of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion" — an idle 
dream indeed for a vigorous young poet in a land that needed 
the breath of a new life. Why dawdle over Theocritus when 
fields are newly green and youth is calling? Stedman himself 
seems to have misgivings. "When the job [the collecting of the 
various texts] was nearly ended, I reflected that one's freshest 
years should be given to original work, and such excursions might 
well be deferred to the pleasures of old age. My time seemed to 
have been wasted. ' ' " 

During this earlier period poetry was to him an artistic thing 
to be judged coldly from the standpoint of art and beauty. He 
worked with extreme care upon his lines. For a time he con- 
sidered that he had reached his highest level in " Alcetrj^on," and 
he waited eagerly for the world to discover it. William Winter, 
his fellow poet of beauty, hailed it as "not unworthy of the 

6 Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, i : 384. 



124 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

greatest living poet, Tennyson"; Professor Hadley of Yale pro- 
nounced it "one of the most successful modern-antiques that I 
have ever seen. ' ' Then Lowell, with one of his flashes of insight, 
told the whole truth: "I don't believe in these modern antiques 
— no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of 'em. They 
are all wrong. It is like writing Latin verses — the material you 
work in is dead." It was the voice of an oracle to the young 
poet. Twenty-three years later he wrote of his chagrin when 
Lowell had praised his volume in the North American Review and 
had said nothing of his piece de resistance "Alectryon." 
"Finally I hinted as much to him. He at once said that it was 
my 'best piece of work,' but no 'addition to poetic literature,' 
since we already have enough masterpieces of that kind — from 
Landor 's Hamadryad and Tennyson's (E7ione down to the latest 
effort by Swinburne or Mr. Fields. . , . Upon reflection, I 
thought Lowell right. A new land calls for new song. ' ' ' 

The episode is a most significant one. It marks the passing of 
a whole poetic school. 

To the war period that followed this era in the poet's life be- 
long the deepest notes of Stedman's song. In his Alice of Mon- 
mouth, he is no longer the mere poet of beauty, he is the inter- 
preter of the thrill, the sacrifice, the soul of the great war. The 
poem has the bite of life in it. "The Cavalry Song" thrills with 
the very soul of battle : 

Dash on beneath the smoking dome, 

Through level lightnings gallop nearer! 
One look to Heaven! no thoughts of home: 
The guidons that we bear are dearer. 

Charg-e ! 
Cling! Clang! forward all! 
Heaven help those whose horses fall! 
Cut left and right! 

The poem "Wanted— a Man" written in the despondent au- 
tumn of 1862, came not from books, but hot from a man 's heart : 

Give us a man of God's own mold, 

Born to marshal his fellow men; 
One whose fame is not bought or sold 

At the stroke of a politician's pen; 

Give us the man of thousands ten, 

7 Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, i : 372. 



THE TRANSITION POETS 125 

Fit to do as well as to plan; 

Give us a rallying-cry, and then, 
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man ! 

0, we will follow him to the death, 

Where the foeman's fiercest columns are! 
0, we will use our latest breath, 

Cheering- for every sacred star! 

His to marshal us high and far; 
Ours to battle, as patriots can 

When a Hero leads the Holy War! — 
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man ! 

Poems like this will not die. They are a part of the deeper 
history of America. They are worth more than ships or guns or 
battlements. Only a few notes like this did Stedman strike. 
Once again its deep note rang in ''The Hand of Lincoln" : 

Lo, as I gaze, that statured man, 

Built up from yon large hand, appears: 

A type that Nature wills to plan 
But once in all a people's years. 

What better than this voiceless east 

To tell of such a one as he, 
Since through its living semblance passed 

The thought that bade a race be free! 

Another deep note he struck in that war period that so shook 
him, a note called forth by personal bereavement and put into 
immortal form in ' ' The Undiscovered Country, ' ' a song that was 
to be sung at the funerals of his wife and his sons, and later at 
his own : 

Could we but know 

The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel, 
Where lie those happier hills and meadows low — 

Ah, if beyond the spirit's inmost cavil, 
Aught of that Country could we surely know, 
Who would not go? 

Aside from a handful of spontaneous love songs — "At Twi- 
light," "Autumn Song," "Stanzas for Music," "Song from a 
Drama," "Creole Love Song" — nothing else of Stedman 's poetic 
work greatly matters. He is a lyrist who struck a few true notes, 
a half dozen perhaps — thin indeed in volume, but those few im- 
mortal. 



126 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

As the new period progressed, the period in America that bad 
awakened to the full realization that "a new land needs new 
song," he became gradually silent as a singer and gave himself 
more and more to prose criticism, a work for which nature had 
peculiarly endowed him. 

IV 

In this transition group, poets of external beauty, Spdtroman- 
tiker yet classicists in their reverence for rule and tradition and 
in their struggle for perfection, the typical figure is Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) . By birth he was a New Englander, 
a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent that 
boyhood which he made classic in the Story of a Bad Boy. Three 
years in New Orleans whither his father had moved for business 
reasons, years that seem to have made slight impression upon him, 
and then, his father dying and a college course becoming out of 
the question, he went with his mother to New York, where he 
resided for fourteen years, or between 1852 and 1866. It was a 
period of activity and of contact with many things that were to 
influence his later life. He held successively the positions of 
counting-room clerk, junior literary critic on the Evening 
Mirror, sub-editor of the Home Journal, literary adviser to Derby 
and Jackson, and managing editor of the Illustrated News. He 
formed a close friendship with Taylor and Stoddard and Sted- 
man, and he saw something of the Bohemian group that during 
the late fifties and early sixties made headquarters at Pfaff 's cele- 
brated resort, 647 Broadway. Then came his call to Boston as 
editor of Every Saturday, his adoption as a Brahmin, his resi- 
dence on Beacon Street, and his admission to the inner circle of 
the Atlantic Monthly. 

Aldrich 's literary life was from first to last a struggle between 
his Bohemian New York education and his later Brahmin clas- 
sicism. His first approach to poetry had been through G. P. 
]\Iorris and Willis on the Mirror and the Journal. From them it 
was that he learned the strain of sentimentalism which was to 
produce such poems as "Mabel, Little Mabel," "Marian, May, 
and ]\Iaud, ' ' and ' ' Babie Bell. ' ' Then swiftly he had come under 
the spell of Longfellow's German romance, with its Emma of 
Ilmenau maidens, its delicious sadness and longing, and its wor- 
ship of the night— that dreamy old-world atmosphere which had 



THE TRANSITION POETS 127 

so influenced the mid century. It possessed the young poet com- 
pletely, so completely that he never freed himself entirely from 
its spell. Longfellow was his poet master : 

Poet-soul! gentle one! 

Thy thought has made my darkness light; 
The solemn voices of the night 
Have filled me with an inner tone. 

1 'II drink thy praise in olden wine, 
And in the cloak of fine eoneeite 
I '11 tell thee how my pulses beat, 

How half my being runs to thine. 

Then had come the acquaintance with Taylor and Stoddard, and 
through them the powerful influence of Keats and Tennyson. 

To study the evolution of Aldrich as a poet, one need not linger 
long over The Bells ( 1855 ) , that earliest collection of echoes and 
immaturities; one will do better to begin with his prose work, 
Daisy's Necklace, published two years later, a book that has a 
significance out of all proportion to its value. As we read it we 
are aware for the first time of the fact which was to become more 
and more evident with every year, that there were two Aldriches : 
the New York romanticist dreaming over his Hyperion, his Keats, 
his Tennyson, and the Boston classicist, severe with all exuber- 
ance, correct, and brilliant. The book is crude, a mere melange 
of quotations and echoes, fantastic often and sentimental, yet one 
cannot read a chapter of it without feeling that it was written 
with all seriousness. When, for example, the young poet speaks 
of "The Eve of St. Agnes," we know that he speaks from his 
heart: '*I sometimes think that this poem is the most exquisite 
definition of one phase of poetry in our language. IMusical 
rhythm, imperial words, gorgeous color and luxurious conceit 
seemed to have culminated in it. ' ' But in the Prologue and the 
Epilogue of the book there is the later Aldrich, the classicist and 
critic, who warns us that the work is not to be taken seriously : 
that it is a mere burlesque, an extravaganza. 

In his earlier work he is a true member of the New York 
school. He looks at life and poetry from the same standpoint 
that Taylor and Stoddard had viewed them in their attic room on 
those ambrosial nights when they had really lived. Taylor's 
Poems of the Orient, inspired by Shelley's "Lines to an Indian 



128 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Air" and by Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," 
made a profound impression upon him. Stoddard, who soon was 
to issue his Book of the East, was also to the young poet like one 
from a rarer world. When in 1858 Aldrich in his twenty-second 
year issued his gorgeous oriental poem, The Course of True Love 
Never Did Run Smooth, he dedicated it to Stoddard, "under 
whose fingers this story^ would have blossomed into true Arabian 
roses." To his next volume he was to add Cloth of Gold, a 
grouping of sensuous lyrics breathing the soul of "The Eve of 
St. Agnes": "Tiger Lilies," "The Sultana," "Latakia," 
"When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan," and others. Even as Tay- 
lor and Stoddard, he dreamed that his soul was native in the 
East: 

I must have known 
Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled, 
For in my veins some Orient blood is red. 
And through my thoughts are lotus blossoms blown. 

Everywhere in this earlier work sensuous beauty, soft music 
faintly heard in an atmosphere breathing sandal-wood, and 
oriental perfume : 

Lavender and spikenard sweet, 
And attars, nedd, and richest musk. 

Everywhere rich interiors, banquets fit for Porphyro to spread 
for Madeline, and, dimly seen in the spice-breathing twilight, the 
maiden of his dreams : 

The music sang itself to death, 

The lamps died out in their perfume: 
Abbassa, on a silk divan, 

Sate in the moonlight of her room. 
Her handmaid loosed her scented hair 

With lily fingers; from her brow 
Released the diamond, and unlaced 

The robe that held her bosom's snow; 
Removed the slippers from her feet 

And led her to an ivory bed. 

Had Aldrich persisted in such work, he would have become 
simply another Stoddard, an echoer of soft sweetness, out of 
print in the generation following his death. But for Aldrich 
there was a restraining force. The classicist, the Brahmin, within 



THE TRANSITION POETS 129 

the sentimental young poet was to be awakened by the greatest 
of the classicists and the Brahmins, Dr. Holmes, himself. "You 
must not feed too much on 'apricots and dewberries,' " he wrote 
in 1863. * ' There is an exquisite sensuousness that shows through 
your words and rounds them into voluptuous swells of rhythm as 
'invisible fingers of air' lift the diaphanous gauzes. Do not let 
it run away with you. You love the fragrance of certain words 
so well that you are in danger of making nosegays when you 
should write poems. . . . Your tendency to vanilla-flavored ad- 
jectives and patchouli-scented participles stifles your strength in 
cloying euphemisms. ' ' ^ 

Wise criticism, but the critic said nothing of a deeper and more 
insidious fault. There was no originality in Aldrich's earlier 
work. Everywhere it echoed other poetry. Like Taylor and 
Stoddard, the poet had so saturated himself with the writings 
of others that unconsciously he imitated. One can illustrate this 
no better perhaps than by examining a passage which Boynton 
in a review of the poet cites as beauty of the highest order. It 
is from the poem ' ' Judith ' ' : 

Thy breath upon my cheek is as the air 
Blown from a far-off grove of cynnamon, 
Fairer art thou than is the night's one star; 
Thou makest me a poet with thine eyes. 

Beautiful indeed it is, but one cannot help thinking of Keats' 
' ' Eve 's one star ' ' and Marlowe 's : 

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars; 
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter. 

Sweet Helen, make me immortal Avith a kiss. 

One has, too, an uneasy feeling that the whole poem would never 
have been written but for Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustuni" and 
Tennyson 's narratives. 

Aldrich's later life was a prolonged struggle against the poetic 
habits of this New York period of his training. The second side 
of his personality, however, that severe classical spirit which made 
war with his romantic excesses, more and more possessed him. * ' I 
have a way," he wrote in 1900, "of looking at my own verse as 

8 Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 64. 



130 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

if it were written by some man I did n't like very well, and thus 
I am able to look at it rather impersonally, and to discover when 
I have fallen into mere 'fine writing,' a fault I am inclined to, 
while I detest it." » . , 

Imitation was his besetting sin. It was his realization of this 
fact more than anything else that caused him to omit from later 
editions such wide areas of his earlier work. Of the forty-eight 
poems in The Bells he suffered not one to be reprinted; of his 
second volume he reprinted only two fragments: "Dressing the 
Bride" and "Songs from the Persian"; of the forty-seven lyrics 
in his third volume he admitted only seven into his definitive 
edition, and of the twenty in his fourth volume he spared but five. 
Of the vast number of lyrics that he had produced before the edi- 
tion of 1882 only thirty-three were deemed of enough value to be 
admitted into his final canon. 

It was not alone on account of its lack of finish that this enor- 
mous mass of poetical material was condemned. The poet had 
been born with nothing in particular to say. Nothing had com- 
pelled him to write save a dilettante desire to work with beautiful 
things. liis life had known no period of storm and stress from 
which were to radiate new forces. His poems had been therefore 
not creations, but exercises to be thrown aside when the mood had 
passed. Exquisite work it often was, but there was no experience 
in it, no depth of life, no color of any soil save that of the dream- 
world of other poets. 

The Aldrich of the later years became more and more an artist, 
a seeker for the perfect, a classicist. ' ' The things that have come 
down to us," he wrote once to Stedman, "the things that have 
lasted, are perfect in form. I believe many a fine thought has 
perished being inadequately expressed, and I know that many a 
light fancy is immortal because of its perfect wording. " ^^ He 
defended himself again and again from the charge that he was a 
mere carver of cherry stones, a maker of exquisite trifles. 
"Jones's or Smith's lines," he wrote in 1897, " 'to my lady's eye- 
brow' — which is lovely in every age — will outlast nine-tenths of 
the noisy verse of our stress and storm period. Smith or Jones 
who never dreamed of having a Mission, will placidly sweep down 

Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 210. 
10 ibid., 156. 



THE TRANSITION POETS 131 

to posterity over the fall of a girl's eyelash, leaving our shrill 
didactic singers high and dry on the sands of time." '^ 
He has summed it up in his ' ' Funeral of a Minor Poet ' ' : 

Beauty alone endures from age to age, 
From age to age endures, handmaid of God, 
Poets who walk with her on earth go hence 
Bearing a talisman. 

And again in his poem "Art": 

''Let art be all in all," one time I said 
And straightway stirred the hypercritic gall: 
I said not, "Let technique be all in all," 
But art — a wider meaning. 

His essay on Herrick was in reality an apology for himself: 
"It sometimes happens that the light love song, reaching few or 
no ears at its first singing, outlasts the seemingly more prosperous 
ode which, dealing with some passing phase of thought, social or 
political, gains the instant applause of the multitude. . . , His 
workmanship places him among the masters. ... Of passion, in 
the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here are no 'tears 
from the depth of some divine despair, ' no probing into the tragic 
heart of man, no insight that goes much further than the pathos 
of a cowslip on a maiden's grave." 

All this is true so far as it goes, but it must never be forgotten 
that beauty is a thing that concerns itself with far more than the 
externals of sense. To be of positive value it must deal with the 
soul of man and the deeps of human life. A poet now and then 
may live because of his lyric to a girl's eyelash, but it is certain 
that the greater poets of the race have looked vastly deeper than 
this or they never would have survived the years. Unless the 
poet sees beyond the eyelash into the soul and the deeps of life, 
he will survive his generation only by accident or by circumstance, 
a fact that Aldrich himself tacitly admitted in later years by 
dropping from the final edition of his poems all lyrics that had 
as their theme the merely trivial. 

To the early Aldrich, life had been too kind. He had known 
nothing of the bitterness of defeat, the losing battle with fate, the 
inexorableness of bereavement. He had little sympathy with 

11 Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 200. 



132 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

his times and their problems, and with his countrymen. Like 
Longfellow, he lived in his study and his study had only eastern 
windows. Herrick, whom he defended as a poet immortal because 
of trifles made perfect, can never be charged with this. No singer 
ever held more to his own soil and the spirit of his own times. 
Ilis poems everywhere are redolent of England, of English 
meadows and streams, of English flowers. He is an English poet 
and only an English poet. But so far as one may learn from his 
earlier work, Aldrich might have lived in England or indeed in 
France. From such lyrics as "The "Winter Robin" one would 
guess that he was English. Surely when he longs for the spring 
and the return of the jay we may conclude with certainty that 
he was not a New Englander. 

During his earlier life he was in America but not of it. Even 
the war had little effect upon him. He was inclined to look at 
life from the standpoint of the aristocrat. He held himself aloof 
from his generation with little of sympathy for the struggling 
masses. He was suspicious of democracy: "We shall have 
bloody work in this country some of these days," he wrote to 
Woodberry in 1894, ' ' when the lazy canaille get organized. They 
are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville. ' ' ^^ And again, 
"Emerson's mind would have been enriched if he could have had 
more terrapin and less fish-ball. ' ' 

The mighty westward movement in America after the war con- 
cerned him not at all. Much in the new literary movement re- 
pelled him. He denounced Kipling and declared that he would 
have rejected the "Recessional" had it been offered to the 
Atlantic. Realism he despised: 

The mighty Zolaistie Movement now 
Engrosses us — a miasmatic breath 
Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is, 
The hideous side of it, with careful pains 
Making a god of the dull Commonplace, 
For have we not the old gods overthrown 
And set up strangest idols? 

A poet should be a leader of his generation. He should be in 
sympathy with it; he should interpret the nation to itself; he 
should have vision and he should be a compeller of visions.' It 
IS not his mission weakly to complain that the old is passing and 
12 Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 178. 



THE TRANSITION POETS 133 

that the new is strange and worthless. The America of the seven- 
ties and the eighties was tremendously alive. It was breaking 
new areas and organizing a new empire in the West ; it was lifting 
up a splendid new hope for all mankind. It needed a poet, and 
its poets were looking eastward and singing of the fall of my 
lady's eyelash. 



The best refutation of Aldrich is furnished by Aldrich himself. 
The years between 1881 and 1890, the period of his editorship of 
the Atlantic Monthly, were a time of small production, of pause 
and calm, of ripening, of final adjustment. Following his resig- 
nation of the editorship, he began again actively to produce poetry 
and now for ten or twelve years he worked in contemporary life — 
in occasional and commemorative odes, monodies and elegies; in 
studies of the deeper meanings of life ; in problems of death and 
of destiny. The volumes of 1891, 1895, and 1896 contain the 
soul of all his poetry. From them he omitted practically nothing 
when at last he made up the definitive edition of his work. The 
Aldrich of the sixties and the seventies had been trivial, artificial, 
sentimental ; the Aldrich who wrote in the nineties had a purpose : 
he worked now in the deeps of life ; he was in earnest ; he had a 
message. It is significant in view of his oft expressed theories of 
poetry that when in 1897 Stedman asked him to indicate his best 
lyrics for publication in the American Anthology, he chose these : 
"Shaw Memorial Ode," "Outward Bound," "Andromeda," 
"Reminiscence," "The Last Cffisar," "Alice Yeaton's Son," 
"Unguarded Gates," "A Shadow of the Night," "Monody 
on Wendell Phillips," "To Hafiz," "Prescience," "Santo 
Domingo," "Tennyson," "Memory," "Twilight," "Quits"— 
all but one of them, "Prescience," first published after 
1891. There are no "apricots and dewberries" about these 
masterly lyrics; they deal with no such trivialities as the 
fall of an eyelash. They thrill with the problems of life 
and with experience. It was not until this later period that 
the poet could say to a bereaved friend: "You will recall 
a poem of mine entitled 'A Shadow of the Night.' There is 
a passage here and there that might possibly appeal to you ' '—a 
severe test, but one that reveals the true poet. What has he for 
his generation? What has he for the crises of life, inevitably 



134 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

must be asked at last of every poet. His change of ideals he 
voiced in ' ' Andromeda ' ' : 

The smooth-worn coin and threadbare classic phrase 
Of Grecian myths that did beguile my youth 
Bes'uile me not as in the olden days: 
I think more grace and beauty dwell with truth. 

Now in the rich afternoon of his art the poet is no longer con- 
tent to echo the music of masters. He has awakened to the deeper 
meanings of life ; he is himself a master ; he now has something to 
say, and the years of his apprenticeship have given him a flawless 
style in which to say it. No other American poet has approached 
the perfect art of these later lyrics. Who else on this side of the 
water could have written "The Sisters' Tragedy," with its mel- 
ody, its finish, its distinction of phrase ? 

Both still were young, in life's rich summer yet; 
And one was dark, with tints of violet 
In hair and eye, and one was blonde as she 
Who rose — a second daybreak — from the sea 
Gold tressed and azure-eyed. 

And, moreover, in addition to all this it is a quivering section 
of human life. One reads on and on and then — sharply draws his 
breath at the rapier thrust of the closing lines. 

What a world of distance between the early sensuous poet of 
the New York school and the seer of the later period who could 
pen a lyric beginning, 

short-breathed music, dying on the tongue 

Ere half the mystic canticle be sung! 

harp of life so speedily unstrung! 

Who, if 'twere his to choose, would know again 

The bitter sweetness of the last refrain, 

Its rapture and its painf 

Or this in its flawless perfeetness : 

At noon of night, and at the night's pale end, 

Such things have chanced to me 
As one, by day, would scarcely tell a friend 

For fear of mockery. 

Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain! 

I know not, faith, not I. 
Is it more strange the dead should walk again 

Than that the quick should die? 



THE TRANSITION POETS 135 

A few of his later sonnets, "Outward Bound," redolent of his 
early love of the sea, ""When to Soft Sleep We Give Ourselves 
Away," "The Undiscovered Country," "Enamored Architect of 
Airy Rhyme, ' ' and ' ' I Vex Me Not with Brooding on the Years, ' ' 
have hardly been surpassed in American literature. 

It was from this later period that Aldrich chose almost all of 
his poems in that compressed volume which was to be his lasting 
contribution to poetry, A Book of Songs and Sonnets. It is but 
a fraction of his work, but it is all that will survive the years. 
He will go down as the most finished poet that America has yet 
produced; the later Landor, romantic yet severely classical; the 
maker of trifles that were miracles of art; and finally as the be- 
lated singer who awoke in his later years to message and vision 
and produced with his mastered art a handful of perfect lyrics 
that rank with the strongest that America has given to song. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

James Bayard Taylor. (1825-1878.) Ximena; or, the Battle of Sierra 
Morena, and other Poems, Philadelphia, 1844; Rhymes of Travel, Ballads, 
Lyrics, and Songs, Boston and London, 1851; Poems of the Orient, Boston, 
1854; Poems of Home and Travel, 1855; The Poefs Journal, 1862; The 
Picture of St. John, a Poem, 1866; Translation of Faust, 1870-1871; The 
Masque of the Gods, 1872; Lars: a Pastoral of Norway, 1873; The Prophet: 
a Tragedy, 1874; Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics, 1875; The Na- 
tional Ode, 1876; Prince Deukalion, 1878; Poetical Works, Household Edi- 
tion, 1880, 1902; Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, edited by Marie Han- 
sen Taylor and Horace E. Scudder. 2 vols. 1884; Bayard Taylor, Amer- 
ican Men of Letters Series, A. H. Smyth. 1896; Life of Bayard Taylor, 
R. H. Conwell. 

Richard Henry Stoddard. (1825-1903.) Footprints, New York, 1849; 
Poems, Boston, 1852; Songs of Summer, Boston, 1857; The King's Bell, 
New York, 1862; Abraham Lincoln: an Horatian Ode, New York, 1865; 
The Book of the East, and Other Poems, Boston, 1871; Poems, New York, 
1880; The Lion's Cub, icith Other Verse, New York, 1890; Recollections, 
Personal and Literary, by Richard Henry Stoddard. Edited by Ripley 
Hitchcock, New York, 1903. 

Edmund Clarence Stedman. (1833-1908.) The Prince's Ball, New 
York, 1860; Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic, New York, 1860; The Battle of 
Bull Run, New York, 1861; Alice of Monmouth. An Idyl of the Great 
War and Other Poems, New York, 1863; The Blameless Prince, and Other 
Poems, Boston, 1869; The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 
Boston, 1873; Favorite Poems. Vest Pocket Series, 1877; Ilaicthornc and 
Other Poems, 1877; Lyrics and Idyls with Other Poems, London, 1879; 
The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman. Household Edition, 



136 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

1884; Songs and Ballads, 1884; Poems Now First Collected, 1897; Mater 
Coronata, 1901; The Poems of Edmvnd Clarence Stedman, 1908; Life and 
Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman. By Laura Stedman and George M, 
Gould. 2 vols. New York, 1910. 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich. (1836-1907.) The Bells. A Collection of 
Chimes, New York, 1855; Daisy's Necklace and What Came of It. A Lit- 
erary Episode [Prose], New York, 1857; The Course of True Love Never 
Did Run Smooth, New York, 1858; The Ballad of Babie Bell, and Other 
Poems, New Y'ork, 1859; Pampinea, and Other Poems, New York, 1861; 
Poems. With Portrait, New York, 1863; The Poems of Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich. Boston, 1865; Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems, 1874; Flower and 
Thorn. Later Poems, 1877; Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book, and. Other 
Poems, 1881; XXXVI Lyrics and XII Sonnets, 1881; The Poems of Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich. Illustrated by the Paint and Clay Club, 1882; Mercedes, 
and Later Lyrics, 1884; The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Household 
Edition, 1885; Wyndham Totcers, 1890; The Sisters' Tragedy, icith Other 
Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic, 1891; Mercedes. A Drama in Two Acts, 
as Performed at Palmer's Theatre, 1894; Unguarded Gates, and Other 
Poems, 1895; Later Lyrics, 1896; Judith and Holof ernes, a Poem, 1896; 
The Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Riverside Edition, 1896; The Poems 
of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Revised and Complete Household Edition, 
1897; .1 Book of Songs and Sonnets Selected from the Poems of Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich, 1906; The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, by Ferris 
Greenslet, 1908. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 

One phase of the new discovery of America following the Civil 
War — return to reality, insistence upon things as they are — ex- 
pressed itself in nature study. While the new local color school 
was ransacking the odd corners of the land for curious types of 
humanity, these writers were calling attention to the hitherto un- 
noticed phenomena of fields and meadows and woodlands. Hand- 
books of birds and trees, nature guides and charts of all varieties 
were multiplied. Nature study became an art, and it ranged all 
the way from a fad for dilettantes to a solemn exercise in the 
public school curriculum. 



The creator and inspirer and greatest figure of this school of 
nature writers was Henry David Thoreau. In point of time he 
was of the mid-century school that gathered about Emerson, He 
was born in 1817, two years earlier than Lowell, and he died in 
1862, the first to break the earlier group, yet in spirit and in- 
fluence and indeed in everything that makes for the final fixing of 
an author's place in the literary history of his land, he belongs 
to the period after 1870. 

His own generation rejected Thoreau. They could see in hira 
only an imitator of Emerson and an exploiter of newnesses in an 
age grow^n weary of newnesses. They did not condemn him : they 
ignored him. Of his first book, A Week on the Concord and 
Merrimac Rivers, 1849, printed at Thoreau 's expense, only two 
hundred and nineteen copies had been sold in 1853 when the 
remainder of the edition was returned to the author. Walden; 
or, Life in the Woods fared somewhat better because of the unique 
social experiment which it recorded, but not enough better to en- 
courage its author ever to publish another book. After the death 
of Thoreau, Emerson undertook to give him permanence by edit- 
ing four or five posthumous volumes made up of his scattered 

137 



138 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

magazine articles and papers, but even this powerful influence 
could not arouse enthusiasm. The North American Review, 
which in 1854 had devoted seven patronizing lines to Walden, 
took no note of Emerson's editings until the Letters to Various 
Persons appeared in 1865. Then it awoke in anger. To publish 
the letters of an author is to proclaim that author 's importance, 
and what had Thoreau done save to live as a hermit for two years 
in the woods? He was a mere eccentric, a "Diogenes in his 
barrel, reducing his wants to a little sunlight"; one of "the 
pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen." 
"It is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works 
should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from 
his own garden." He was an egotist, a poser for effect, a con- 
demner of what he could not himself attain to. "He condemns 
a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he had never had 
the means of testing." "He had no humor"; "he had little 
active imagination " ; "he was not by nature an observer. " " He 
turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something 
new of them. ' ' His nature study was only ' ' one more symptom 
of the general liver complaint." "I look upon a great deal of 
the modem sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. ' ' 

The review was from no less a pen than Lowell 's and it carried 
conviction. Its author spread it widely by republishing it in 
My Study Windows, 1871, and including it in his collected works. 
It was the voice of Thoreau 's generation, and to England at least 
it seems to have been the final word. Stevenson after reading the 
essay was emboldened to sum up the man in one word, a 
"skulker." The effect was almost equally strong in America. 
During the period from 1868 to 1881, not one of the author's 
volumes was republished in a new edition. When in 1870 Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson, his foremost champion in the dark period, 
had attempted to secure the manuscript journal for possible pub- 
lication, he was met by Judge Hoar, the latter-day guardian of 
Concord, with the question : ' ' Wliy should any one wish to have 
Thoreau 's journal printed?" 

That was the attitude of the seventies. Then had come the 
slow revival of the eighties. At the beginning of the decade 
H. G. 0. Blake, into whose hands Thoreau 's papers had fallen, 
began to publish extracts from the journals grouped according 
to days and seasons: Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881, 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 139 

Summer, 1884, and Winter, 1888. The break came in the nine- 
ties. Between 1893 and 1906 were published, in addition to 
many individual reprints of Thoreau's books, the Riverside edi- 
tion in ten volumes, the complete journal in fourteen volumes, 
and the definitive Walden edition in twenty volumes. A Thoreau 
cult had arisen that hailed him as leader and master. After all 
the years he had arrived at his own. In the case of no other 
American has there been so complete and overwhelming a reversal 
of the verdict of an author's own generation. 

Lowell devoted his whole essay to a criticism of Thoreau as a 
Transcendental theorist and social reformer. To-day it is recog- 
nized that fundamentally he was neither of these. His rehabili- 
tation has come solely because of that element condemned by 
Lowell as a certain "modern sentimentalism about Nature." It 
is not alone because he was a naturalist that he has lived, or 
because he loved and lived with Nature: it was because he 
brought to the study of Nature a new manner, because he created 
a new nature sentiment, and so added a new field to literature. 
Instead of having been an imitator of Emerson, he is now seen 
to have been a positive original force, the most original, perhaps, 
save Whitman, that has contributed to American literature. 

The first fact of importance about Thoreau is the fact that he 
wrote day after day, seldom a day omitted for years, the 6,811 
closely printed pages of his journal, every part done with thor- 
oughness and finish, with no dream that it ever was to be pub- 
lished. It is a fact enormously significant; it reveals to us the 
naked man; it furnishes a basis for all constructive criticism. 
"My journal," he wrote November 16, 1850, "should be the 
record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I 
love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what I love to think 
of." And again, "Who keeps a journal is purveyor to the 
gods." And still again, February 8, 1841, "]\Iy journal is that 
of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings 
from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but, 
in it, for the gods. They are my correspondents, to whom daily 
I send off this sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting 
house, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to 
ledger." He was not a poser for effect, for it is impossible for one 
to pose throughout 6,811 printed pages wrought for no eyes save 
his own and the gods. His power came rather from the fact that 



140 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

he did not pose ; that he wrote spontaneously for the sheer love 
of the writing. ' ' I think, ' ' he declares in one place, ' ' that the one 
word that will explain the Shakespeare miracle is unconscious- 
ness." The word explains also Thoreau. Again he adds, 
"There probably has been no more conscious age than the pres- 
ent." The sentence is a key: in a conscious age, a classical age 
building on books, watchful of conventions and precedents, 
Thoreau stood true only to himself and Nature. Between him 
and the school of Taylor and Stoddard there was the whole 
diameter. He was affected only by the real, by experience, by 
the testimony of his own soul. "The forcible writer," he wrote 
February 3, 1852, "stands boldly behind his words with his ex- 
perience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been 
there in person." 

In his nature observations Thoreau was not a scientist. It 
was not his object to collect endless data for the purpose of ar- 
ri\ang at laws and generalizations. He approached Nature 
rather as a poet. There was in him an innate love for the wild 
and elemental. He had, moreover, a passion for transcending, 
or peering beyond, those bounds of ordinary experience and cap- 
turing the half -divined secrets that Nature so jealously guards. 
His attitude was one of perpetual wonder, that wonder of the 
child which has produced the mythology of the race. Always 
was he seeking to catch Nature for an instant off her guard. His 
eyes were on the strain for the unseen, his ears for the unheard. 

I was always conscious of sounds in Nature which my ears could 
not hear, that I caught but a prekide to a strain. She always retreats 
as I advance. Away behind and behind is she and her meaning. Will 
not this faith and expectation make itself ears at length? I never saw 
to the end, nor heard to the end, but the best part was unseen and un- 
heard.— Februaiy 21, 1842. 

Nature so absorbed him that he lived constantly in an eager, 
expectant atmosphere. "I am excited by this wonderful air," 
he writes, ' ' and go, listening for the note of the bluebird or other 
comer. ' ' It was not what he saw in Nature that was important ; 
it was what he felt. "A man has not seen a thing who has not 
felt it." He took stock of his sensations like a miser. "As I 
came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my 
pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck 
stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage de- 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 141 

light, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; 
not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he 
represented." It was by this watchfulness for the elemental, 
this constant scrutiny of instincts and savage outcroppings, that 
he sought to master the secret that baffled him. He would keep 
himself constantly in key, constantly sensitive to every fleeting 
glimpse of harmony that Nature might vouchsafe him. 

Nature stirred him always on the side of the imagination. He 
loved Indian arrow-heads, for they were fragments of a mysteri- 
ous past; he loved twilight effects and midnight walks, for the 
mystery of night challenged him and brought him nearer to the 
cosmic and the infinite : 

I have returned to the woods and . . . spent the hours of midnight 
fishmg from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and 
hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird 
close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable 
to me — anchored m forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods 
from the shore . . . communicating by a long flaxen line with mysteri- 
ous nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or some- 
times dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the 
gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, 
indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain 
blundering purpose there. ... It was very queer, especially in dark 
nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and eosmogonal 
themes in other spheres, to feel this famt jerk which came ... to link 
you to Nature again. 

Burroughs, like most scientists, slept at night. His observa- 
tions were made by day: there is hardly a night scene in all 
his works; but Thoreau abounds in night scenes as much even 
as Novalis or Longfellow. He was at heart a mystic and he 
viewed Nature always from mystic standpoints. In ' ' Night and 
Moonlight" he writes: 

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not 
tempted to explore it— to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, 
and discover the sources of the Nile, perchance the Mountains of the 
Moonf Who knows what fertihty and beauty, moral and natural, arc 
there to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central 
Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. 

It was to discover these :Mountains of the ]\Ioon, these mysteri- 
ous sources of the Nile, forever so far away and yet forever so 
near, that Thoreau went to Nature. He went not to gather and 



142 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

to classify facts; he went to satisfy his soul. Burroughs is in 
clined to wonder and even laugh because of the many times he 
speaks of hearing the voice of unknown birds. To Burroughs 
the forest contained no unknown birds; to Thoreau the forest 
was valuable only because it did contain unknown birds. His 
straining for hidden melodies, his striving for deeper meanings, 
his dreaming of Mountains of the Moon that might become visible 
at any moment just beyond the horizon — it is in these things that 
he differs from all other nature writers. He was not a reporter; 
he was a prophet. "My profession is always to be on the alert, 
to find God in nature, to know His lurking places, to attend all 
the oratorios, the operas in nature. Shall I not have words as 
fresh as my thought ? Shall I use any other man 's word ? ' ' 

To him Nature was of value only as it furnished message for 
humanity. "A fact," he declared, "must be the vehicle of some 
humanity in order to interest us. ' ' He went to Nature for tonic, 
not for fact ; he sought only truth and freedom and spontaneous- 
ness of soul. He had no desire to write a botany, or an ornithol- 
ogy ; rather would he learn of Nature the fundamentals of human 
living. "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliber- 
ately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could 
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, dis- 
cover that I had not lived." Burroughs went into the woods to 
know and to make others to know, Thoreau went in to think and 
to feel; Burrouglis was a naturalist, Thoreau a supematu- 
ralist. 

Thoreau belongs completely to the later period : he is as thor- 
oughly of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or 
Whitman. While Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, 
and the rest of their school were looking eagerly to Europe, 
Thoreau was completely engrossed with his own land. ' ' No truer 
American ever existed than Thoreau," wrote Emerson in his 
essay, "His preference of his country and condition was 
genuine, and his aversion from English and European mannei-s 
and tastes almost reached contempt. ... He wished to go to 
Oregon, not to London. ' ' It was this new-worldness, this fresh- 
ness, this originality that made him the man of the new era. He 
went always to the sources ; his work is redolent at every point 
of American soil. His images, his illustrations, his subject mat- 
ter, all are American. His style, after he had outgrown an early 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 143 

fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own, wonderfully simple 
and limpid and individual. Often it flows like poetry : 

The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching 
stiHness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snowclad 
landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly 
the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of 
light. I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a dis- 
tance and the melodious hooting of an owl. — December 9, 1856. 

And what is this but poetry ? 

On the morning when the wild geese go over, I, too, feel the migra- 
toiy instinct strong within me, and anticipate the breaking up of win- 
ter. If I yielded to this impulse, it would surely guide me to summer 
haunts. This indefinite restlessness and fluttering on the perch no 
doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of nature to a serener 
summer, in long harrows and waving lines, in the spring weathei-, over 
that fair uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their way at 
evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and uproar. — 
January 29, 1859. 

Thoreau was one of the most tonic forces of the later period. 
His inspiration and his spirit filled all the later school of Nature 
writers. One cannot read him long, especially in his later and 
more unconscious work, and find oneself unmoved. He inspires 
to action, to restlessness of soul. Take an entry like that of Jan- 
uary 7, 1857, made during one of the mpst tumultuous of New 
England winter storms: "It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. 
wind. . . . All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. 
This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather," and so on and on 
till one fairly hears the roaring of the storm. Yet, despite the 
blast and the piercing cold, Thoreau goes out for his walk as usual 
and battles with the elements through miles of snow-smothered 
wilderness. "There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk 
in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad 
for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene 
and profitable thought." His battle with the wind and the cold 
and the wilderness grips us as we read. We too would rush into 
the storm and breast it and exult in it ; we too would walk with 
Nature under the open skies, in the broad, wholesome places, and 
view the problems of life with serene soul. It is this dynamic 
element of Thoreau that has given him his following. He is 
sincere, he is working from the impulses of his soul, he is gen- 



144 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

uine. He is not a scientist : he is a poet and a seer. When we 
walk with Burroughs, we see as with new eyes ; when with Tho- 
reau, we feel. With Burroughs we learn of signs and seasons 
and traits ; with Thoreau we find ourselves straining ears to catch 
tlie deeper harmonies, the mysterious soul of Nature, that some- 
how we feel to be intertwined eternally with the soul of man. 



II 

The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805-1884) had 
contributed to the early volumes of the Atlantic a series of bird 
studies Irving-like in atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made 
little impression. He was too literary, too much the child of 
the mid century. In his study of the owl, for instance, he could 
write: "I will not enter into a speculation concerning the na- 
ture and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally 
produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay 
and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of 
poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources 
of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been 
assuaged by time," and so on and on till he got to midnight and 
the owl. It is a literary effort. There is lack of sincerity in it : 
the author is thinking too exclusively of his reader. The dif- 
ference between it and a passage from Thoreau is the difference 
between a reverie in the study and a battle in the woods. Hig- 
ginson, who followed in the Atlantic with "April Days," "The 
Life of Birds," and the other studies which he issued as 
Out-Door Papers in 1863, avoided the over-literary element on 
one hand and the over-scientific on the other and so became the 
first of what may be called the modern school of nature writers. 

As we read Higginson 's book to-day we find style and method 
curiously familiar. For the first time in American literature we 
have that chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half -sentimental treat- 
ment of out-door things that soon was to become so common. 
It is difficult to persuade oneself that a paper like ' ' The Life of 
Birds," for instance, w^as not written by the Burroughs of the 
earlier period. Out-Door Papers and WaJce-RoUn are pitched in 
the same key. Wlio could be positive of the authorship of a 
fragment like this, were not Higginson 's name appended: 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 145 

To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and 
flee from its fading, south ; they must keep near the food on which 
they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors 
shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests; the song-sparrow 
seeks the ground ; the blue-bird finds a box or bole somewhere ; the red- 
wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in the spring than at any other 
season; and even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple- 
tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements 
of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing 
most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the 
change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. 
That the same cat-bird should find its way back, eveiy spring, to almost 
the same branch of yonder larch-tree — that is the thing astonishing 
to me. 

The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door 
papers was their ringing call for a return to reality. It was 
he who more than any one else created interest in Thoreau ; and 
it was he who first gained attention with the cry, "Back to na- 
ture." "The American temperament," he declared, "needs at 
this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of 
semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume 
at one grasp the sovereignty of England. . . . The little I have 
gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well 
as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, 
and insect. . . . Our American life still needs, beyond all things 
else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits. . . . The 
more bent any man is on action, the more profoundly he needs 
the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium. ' ' To the 
new generation of writers he flung a challenge: "Thoreau 
camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely noth- 
ing in Nature has ever yet been described — not a bird or a berry of 
the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of ice, nor winter, 
nor summer, nor sun, nor star. ' ' And again, ' ' AVhat do we know, 
for instance, of the local distribution of our birds ? I remember 
that in my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he 
mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had 
fallen under his unerring eyes. ' ' 

This was published in the Atlantic, September, 1862. In 
May, 1865, as if in answer to the challenge, there appeared 
in the same magazine John Burroughs 's "With the Birds," a 
paper which he had written two years before. The army 
life of Higginson and later his humanitarian work in many 



U6 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

fields put an end to his out-door writings, but not to his in- 
fluence. 

in 

John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, 
just below the Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the 
Leather-stocking Tales. His boyhood until he was seventeen 
"was mainly occupied," to quote his own words, ''with farm 
work in the summer, and with a little study, offset by much 
hunting and trapping of wild animals in winter." One must 
study this boyhood if one is to understand the man 's work : 

From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, 
and of cattle and horses; the sugar-making in the maple woods in 
early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the 
delicious fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shootings; thresh- 
ing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in 
short, eveiything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its ex- 
hilarations. I belonged, as I may say, to them ; and my substance and 
taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. 
I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those material 
examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of 
the world. ^ 

Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of 
and among people who neither read books nor cared for them, 
and my closest associations since have been alien to literature 
and art." The usual winter term in his native district, a year 
or two in academy courses after he was seventeen — that was the 
extent of his formal education. At twenty he was married, at 
twenty-seven, after having drifted about as a school teacher, he 
settled at Washington in a position in the Treasury Department 
that held him closely for nine years. 

It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had 
been awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide 
fields. He read enormously, he studied languages, he trained 
himself with models of English style. His love of the country, 
legacy of the boyhood which he never outgrew, impelled him to 
a systematic study of ornithology. Birds were his avocation, his 
enthusiasm ; by and by they were to become his vocation. 

In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in 
contact with Leaves of Grass, and it aroused him like a vision. 

1 Notes on Walt Whitman, 1867. 



f 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 147 

It produced the impression upon me in my moral consciousness that 
actual Nature did in her material forms and shows; ... I shall never 
forget the strange delight I had from the following passage, as we sat 
there on the sunlit border of an autunm forest : 
I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons of 

things ; 
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen. 
I cannot say to any person what I hear — I cannot say it to myself — it is 

very wonderful; 
It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in 

its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single 

second ; 
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor in 

ten billions of years; 
Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect plane iiiid 

builds a house. 

It was the touch that he needed. There was in him a strain of 
wildness even as in Thorean, an almost feminine shrinking from 
the crowd, a thinking of Nature as something apart from man, a 
retreat and an antidote; Whitman added the human element, 
the sympathetic touch, the sense of the value of man. 

Burroughs 's first work appeared that same year in the New 
York Leader, a series of papers under the heading "From the 
Back Country" — crude things compared with Higginson's pol- 
ished work, yet filled with a genuineness and a freshness that 
were notable. All of his earlier sketches were the work of a 
careful observer who wrote from sheer love of Nature. IMore- 
over, they were the work of a dreamer and a poet. As the years 
took him farther from that marvelous boyhood, the light upon it 
grew softer and more golden. He dreamed of it in the spring 
when the bluebird called and the high-hole ; he dreamed of it on 
his walks in the city suburbs when the swallows greeted him and 
the warblers. His Atlantic paper "With the Birds," now the 
first chapter of his published works, begins with the sentence, 
now suppressed, "Not in the spirit of exact science, but rather 
with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, would I cele- 
brate some of the minstrels of the field and forest." And years 
later, when he wrote the general introduction to his works, he 
could say : 

My first book, Walce-Edbin, was written while I was a government 
clerk in Washington. It enabled me to live over again the days I had 
passed with the birds and in the scenes of my youth. I wrote the 



148 AMERICAN LITERATUEE SINCE 1870 

book sitting at a desk in front of an iron wall. I was keeper of a 
vault in which many millions of bank notes were stored. During my 
long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind re- 
acted from the iron wall in front of me and sought solace in memories 
of the birds and of summer fields and woods! Most of the chapters 
of Winter Sunshine were written at the same desk. The sunshine there 
referred to is of a richer quality than is found in New York and 
New England. 

That was the secret of the early work of John Burroughs: 
to him Nature was a part of his boyhood, with boyhood's light 
upon it. He dreamed of her when the city homesickness was 
upon him and when he wrote of her he wrote from a full heart. 
He felt every line of it; the light that plays over it is indeed 
of "richer quality" than is found over any actual hills. A 
part of his early popularity came undoubtedly from the 
sentiment which he freely mingled with his studies of field and 
woodland. 

There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain 
forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or remove to distant 
lands, events sweep on and all things are changed. Yet there in your 
garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the 
same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed 
with perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your 
reach beneath the eaves of your fathei-'s barn, the same ones now squeak 
and chatter beneath the eaves of your bam. The warblers and shy 
wood birds you pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, 
and whose names you taught to some beloved youth who now, per- 
chance, sleeps amid his native hills, no marks of time or change cling 
to them; and when you walk out to the strange woods, there they 
are, mocking you with their ever renewed and joyous youth. The call 
of the high-holes, the whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of 
the meadow lark, the drumming of the grouse — how these sounds ig- 
nore the years, and strike on the ear with the melody of that spring- 
time when the world was young, and life was all holiday and ro- 
manee.2 

The twenty years following his first Atlantic paper were the 
years of his professional life. He left his clerkship at Washing- 
ton in 1873 to become a national bank inspector, and until 1884, 
when he finally retired to rural life, he was busy with his duties 
as receiver of broken banks, examiner of accounts, and financial 
expert. During the two decades he published his most distinctive 

2 Birds and Poets. "A Bird Melody." 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 149 

nature volumes: Wake-Rohin, Winter Sunshine, Birds and 
Poets, Locusts and Wild Honey, and Pepacton, a small output 
for a man between the years of twenty -six and forty-six, yet one 
that is significant. Not a page of it had been written in haste, 
not a page that his later hand had found it necessary to revise. 
The primal freshness of youth is upon the books ; they are as full 
of vitality and sweetness as a spring morning. Doubtless they 
are all the better for being the enthusiasms of hours stolen from 
a dry profession. It is tonic to read them. They are never at 
fault either in fact or in influence ; they are the work of a trained 
observer, a scientist indeed, yet one who has gone to Nature like a 
priest to the holy of holies with the glow in his heart and the light 
on his face. 

During the following decade, or, more exactly, the period be- 
tween 1884 and 1894, he added four more books, three of them. 
Fresh Fields, Signs and Seasons, and Biverhy, devoted to Na- 
ture, though with more and more of the coldly scientific spirit. 
These with the five earlier volumes stand alone as Burroughs 's 
contribution to the field that he has made peculiarly his own. 
They contain his freshest and most spontaneous work. 

To read these volumes is like going out ourselves into tlie 
forest with an expert guide who sees everything and who has at 
his command an unlimited store of anecdote and chatty reminis- 
cence of birds and animals and even plants. To Burroughs, 
Nature was sufficient in herself. He loved her for the feelings 
she could arouse within him, for the recollections she could stir 
of the springtime of his life, for the beauty and the harmony 
that everywhere he found, and for the elemental laws that he 
saw on all sides at work and that stirred his curiosity. He had 
no desire to study Nature to secure evidences of a governing 
personality. He would draw no moral and offer no solutions of 
the problem of good and evil. Of the fortunes of the spirit of 
man he cared but little ; as for himself, serene, he would fold his 
hands and wait. He was no mystic like Thoreau, listening for 
higher harmonies and peering eagerly beyond every headland 
to discover perchance the sources of the Nile. Upon him there 
was no necessity save to observe, to record, to discover new 
phenomena, to enlarge the store of facts, to walk flat-footed upon 
the material earth and observe the working of tlie physical me- 
chanics about him and to teach others to observe them and to 



150 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

enjoy them. To apprecia4;e the difference between Burroughs 
and Thoreau one has but to read them side by side. For in- 
stance, on March 21, 1853, Thoreau makes this entry : 

As I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime kiln, 
there leaked into my open ear the first peep of a hyla from some far 
pool ... a note or two which scarcely rends the air, does no violence 
to the zephyr, but yet leaks through all obstacles and far over the 
downs to the ear of the listening naturalist, as it were the first faint 
cry of the new-bom year, notwithstanding the notes of birds. Where 
so long I have heard the prattling and moaning of the wind, what 
means this tenser, far-piercing sound? 

Burroughs writes of the same subject in this way: 

From what fact or event shall we really date the beginning of 
spring? The little piping frogs usually furnish a good starting point. 
One spring I heard the first note on the 6th of April; the next on 
the 27th of February; but in reality the latter season was only about 
two weeks earlier than the former. . . . The little piper will some- 
times climb a bullrush to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and 
send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when 
3'ou have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and 
crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains 
and stuns the ear. 

Then in a foot-note : 

The Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since heard 
them in my neighborhood on the Hudson. 

Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid 
earth. He takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with 
the testimony of the senses, and his o^vn senses. Everything — 
example, allusion, figure of speech, subject and predicate — comes 
from him in the concrete. Everything is specific, localized, 
dated. He was in accord with his era that demanded only re- 
ality. It is the task of the writer, he declared, "to pierce through 
our callousness and indifference and give us fresh impressions of 
things as they really are." 

How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Na- 
ture then a thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced 
to formulae? To determine the average day on which the blue- 
bird comes, or the wild geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue 
in that? To Burroughs, Nature was a thing to be observed ac- 
curately for new facts to add to the known. Of Thoreau he 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 151 

wrote: "Ten years of persistent spying and inspecting of Na- 
ture and no new thing found out." Do we ask of the poet and 
the seer simply for mere new material phenomena found out to 
add to our science ? The supreme test that must come at last to 
all literature is the question : How much of human life is there 
in it? How much "Thus saith the Lord"? Wlio seeks for 
material things with eyes, however keen, and dreams of no 
sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance from su- 
pernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a scientist, 
however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic 
be his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls 
short, far short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, 
while Thoreau increases. He must be placed at last among the 
scientists who have added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated 
with the poets and the prophets. 

But though he be thus without vision and without message, 
save as an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to 
observe is a message. Burroughs has a charm of manner and a 
picturesqueness of material that are to be found in few other 
writers of the period. His power lies in his simplicity and his 
sincerity. He is more familiar with his reader than Thoreau. 
He is never literary, never affected ; he talks in the most natural 
way in the world ; he tells story after story in the most artless 
way of homely little happenings that have passed under his own 
eye, and so charming is his talk that we surrender ourselves like 
children to listen as long as he will. When we read Thoreau 
we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets, his distinc- 
tion of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns an-d 
climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full 
of humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but 
with Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and 
the season and the fields. AVe are walking with a delightful 
companion who knows everything and who points out new won- 
ders at every step. 

The poetry of Burroughs faded more and more from his work 
with every book, and the spirit of the scientist, of the trained 
obser^^er impatient of everything not demonstrable by the senses, 
grew upon him, until at length it took full control and expressed 
itself as criticism, as scientific controversy, and as philosophical 
discussion. Riverhy, 1894, with its prefatory note stating that 



152 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

the volume was "probably my last collection of out-of-door pa- 
pers, ' ' marks the point of division between the two periods. If 
we follow the Riverside edition, at present [1914] the definitive 
canon, eight books preceded Riverhy and eight followed it. The 
group's are not homogeneous ; it is not to be gathered that on a 
certain date Burroughs abandoned one form of essay and de- 
voted himself exclusively to another, but it is true that the work 
of his last period is prevailingly scientific and critical. His 
Indoor Studies, 1889, Whitman, a Study, and Literary Values 
are as distinctively works of literary criticism as Arnold's Es- 
says in Criticism; his Light of Day discusses religion from the 
standpoint of the scientist ; his Ways of Nature is scientific contro- 
versy; and his Time and Change and The Summit of the Years 
are philosophy. 

It is in this second period that Burroughs has done his most 
distinctive work, though not perhaps his most spontaneous and 
delightful. By temperament and training he is a critic, a sci- 
entific critic, an analyzer and comparer. Only men of positive 
character, original forces, attract him : Emerson and Whitman, 
and later Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Arnold, men who molded the 
intellectual life of their age. His first published book had been 
a critical study. Notes on Walt Whitman, 1867, a work the most 
wonderful in many ways of his whole output. It came at a 
critical moment, in those pregnant closing years of the sixties, 
And it struck clear and full the note of the new period. Bur- 
roughs 's later studies of Whitman are more finished and more 
mature than this never-republished volume, but they lack its 
clarion quality. It is more than a defense and an explanation 
of Whitman : it is a call to higher levels in literature and art, a 
call for a new definition of poetry, a condemnation of that soft- 
ness and honey sweetness of song that had lured to weakness 
poets like Taylor and Stoddard. Poetry henceforth must be 
more than mere beauty for beauty 's sake : it must have a message ; 
it must come burning from a man 's soul ; it must thrill with hu- 
man life. 

And it is here that Burroughs stands as a dominating figure. 
He was the first of American critics to insist without compromise 
that poetry is poetry only when it is the voice of life — genuine, 
spontaneous, inevitable. "How rare," he complained in later 
years, "are real poems — poems that spring from real feeling, a 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 153 

real throb of emotion, and not from a mere surface itching for ex- 
pression. ' ' This has been the key to all his criticism : literature is 
life, the voicing of a man's soul. Moreover, it is a voicing of the 
national life, the expression of a nation 's soul : 

All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more 
or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and 
prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been 
greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. 
Neither went deep enough to touch the formative cuiTents of our 
social or religious or national life. In the past the gi'eat artist has 
always been at ease in Zion; in our own day only the lesser artists 
are at ease, unless we except Whitman, a man of unshaken faith, who 
is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the 
breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.^ 

The literary criticism of Burroughs — four volumes of it in 
the final edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output — may 
be classed with the sanest and most illuminating critical work in 
American literature. Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at 
times, is overloaded with learning. He belongs to the school of 
the early reviewers, ponderous and discursive. He makes use of 
one-third of his space in his essay on Thoreau before he even 
alludes to Thoreau. He is self-conscious, and self-satisfied ; he 
poses before his reader and enjo3^s the sensation caused by his 
brilliant hit after hit, Stedman, too, is often more literary 
than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase that have 
nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their affecta- 
tion of the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of litera- 
ture rather than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs, how- 
ever, is always simple and direct. He is a scientific critic who 
compares and classifies and seeks causes and effects. He works 
not on the surface but always in the deeper currents and always 
with the positive forces, those writers who have turned the direc- 
tion of the literature and the thinking of their generation. In 
marked contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow and 
Landor among the minor singers: "Their sympathies were 
mainly outside their country and their times." He demands 
that the poet have a message for his age. He says of Emerson: 
"Emerson is a power because he partakes of a great spiritual 
and intellectual movement of his times; he is unequivocally of 
to-day and New England." 
, 3 Literary Values, "Poetry and National Life," 184. 



154 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Burroughs 's nature essays, charming as thev are and full as 
they are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others 
as careful and as charming; Burroughs 's criticism was the voice 
of an era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later 
years that he put forth his real message. 

IV 

John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the 
home instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields 
and woods, and the haunts of his childhood. He is contem- 
plative, tranquil, unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, 
Scotch by temperament as by birth, the very opposite of Bur- 
roughs. He was telescopic, not microscopic; his units were 
glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and Gardens of the Gods. 

The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration 
of his family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of 
Wisconsin, near the Fox River. After a boyhood in what lit- 
erally was a new world to him, he started on his wanderings. 
By accident he found himself in the University of Wisconsin, 
where he studied for four years, the first author of note to be 
connected with the new state college movement, the democratizing 
of education. He pursued no regular course, but devoted himself 
to chemistry, botany, and other natural sciences that interested 
him, and then, to quote his own words, "wandered away on a 
glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted 
nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and 
free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma, of making 
a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful 
beauty." 

First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on 
the ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to 
Cuba, with visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; 
but malarial fever, caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned 
him away from the tropics toward California, where he arrived 
in 1868. The tremendous scenery of this west coast, those Amer- 
ican Alps edging a continent from the Sierras to the Alaskan 
glaciers, so gTipped his imagination and held him that he forgot 
everj'thing save to look and wonder and worship. For years he 
explored the region, living months at a time in the forests of the 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 155 

Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial meadows of 
the Sierra, in passes and canons, moving as far north as Alaska, 
where he was the firat to see the great glacier now called by his 
name, sleeping where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or 
shelter, and returning to civilization only when driven by neces- 
sity. After years of such wandering he became as familiar with 
the mighty region, the tremendous western wall of a continent, 
as Thoreau was with Concord or Burroughs was with the banks 
of the Pepacton. 

Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier 
formative period ; he was a man without a country, anchored to 
no past, a soul unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrod- 
den areas, as hungry of heart as Thoreau, but with none of 
Thoreau 's provincialism and transcendental theories. In 1869 
in the Big Tuolumne Meadows he was told of a marvelous, but 
dangerous, region beyond, and his account of the episode il- 
lumines him as with a flash-light : 

Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland in- 
stincts, he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Canon, and ad- 
vised me to explore it. "I have never seen it myself," he said, "for 
I never was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have heard 
many a strange stoiy about it, and I warrant you will at least find 
it wild enough." Next day I made up a bundle of bread, tied my 
note-book to my belt, and strode away in the bracing air, full of 
eager, indefinite hope. 

His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers, 
was published in the New York Tribune in 1871. Later he con- 
tributed to the Overland Monthly, to Harper's, and Scribner's 
Monthly articles that have in them an atmosphere unique in lit- 
erature. What sweep and freedom, what vastness of scale, what 
abysses and gulfs, what wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweep- 
ing over a continent in a balloon. One is ever in the vast places : 
one thrills with the author 's own excitement : 

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten 
sky-gardens amidst so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains. 
. . . From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now 
on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and 
again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down 
among the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and 
peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper 
Tuolumne, and ti-ying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, 



156 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

pierced with its rays, one's body is all a tingling palate. Who 
wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem 
nothing.— July 26, 18G9. 

I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of the lakes, where 
a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then 
after making a tin cupful of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on 
the gi-andeur and sig-nificance of the glacial records I had seen. As 
the night advanced, the mighty rock-walls of my mountain mansion 
seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness 
stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely 
down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a 
long fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy 
branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the 
mountaineer. 

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of 
the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with 
God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. 
. . . Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and 
bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite 
hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresisting effort that 
lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of 
God's power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eter- 
nal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript. — July 20, 1869. 

To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty 
companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the 
spring meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night 
before and comparing the dates of the hyla 's first cry ; it is rather 
to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and moun- 
tain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly 
along the bare tops of ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness 
and awfulness, who cries, "Come with me along the glaciers 
and see God making landscapes ! ' ' One gets at the heart of Muir 
in an episode like this, the description of a terrific storm in the 
Yuba region in December, 1874: 

The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of 
them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible 
when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and 
every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement. I 
drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion 
across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often falling in the lee of a 
rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the glad anthem 
had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying 
tones of individual trees— spinice, and fir, and pine, and leafless oak. 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 157 

. . . Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses 
of hazel and ceanotbus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in 
the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine 
thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my 
ear close to the iEolian music of its topmost needles. . . , Being ac- 
customed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no 
difficulty m reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy 
so noble an exliilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped 
and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward 
and forwai'd, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of 
vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, 
like a bobolink on a reed. 

He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, 
a sly Scotch drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. 
In the Bloody Cailon he meets the Mono Indians and finds little 
in them that is romantic: 

The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient 
in some places and so undisturbed as almost to possess a geological 
significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and 
divided into sections by furrows that looked like cleavage joints, sug- 
gesting exposure in a castaway condition on the mountains for ages. 
Viewed at a little distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the 
landscape. 

Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited mys- 
■ ticism with his Scotch bloo.d as he inherited wildness and the love 
of freedom. He was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent 
only on facts and laws: he was a searcher after God, even as 
Thoreau. As one reads him, one feels one's soul expanding, 
one 's horizons widening, one 's hands reaching out for the infinite. 
The message of Muir is compelling and eager : 

Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-tops, the alpenglow 
is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God; 
. . . stay on this good fire mountain and spend the night among the 
stars. Watch their glorious bloom until dawn, and get one more bap- 
tism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and 
whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may 
aftei-wards chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, 
and look back with joy. 

And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose 
lyric, rapturous and infectious, he cries: 

And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what 
purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a 
winr ow look into Nature's warm heart. 



158 AMERICAN LITEEATURE SINCE 1870 

The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To 
one who cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, 
it is hard to offer inducements. He wrote only to please him- 
self; he would not be commanded or bribed or begged, for why 
should one write words when the Sierras are in bloom and the 
winds are calling in the upper peaks? The public at large 
knows little of him, compared with what it knows of Burroughs 
or even of Thoreau. His influence, therefore, has been small. 
Though he had published many magazine articles, it was not 
until 1894 that he published The Mountains of California, his 
first book. Our National Parks came in 1901, and My First 
Summer in the Sierra in 1911. The last is Muir's journal, kept 
on the spot, full of the thrill and the freshness of the original day. 
If it be a sample of the journal which we have reason to believe 
that he kept with Tlioreau-like thoroughness almost to the time 
of his death — he died in December, 1914 — the best work of John 
Muir may even yet be in store. 

]\Iuir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more 
sympathetic with everything alive in the wild places which he 
loved. Unlike Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, 
and, unlike Thoreau, he has refused to kill even fish or rattle- 
snakes. He could look on even the repulsive lizards of his region, 
some of them veritable monsters in size and hideousness, with 
real affection: 

Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are easily tamed, 
and have beautiful eyes, expressing the clearest innocence, so that, 
in spite of prejudices brought from cool, lizardless countries, one must 
soon leani to like them. Even the homed toad of the plains and foot- 
hills, called horrid, is mild and gentle, with charming eyes, and so are 
the snake-like species found in the underbrush of "the lower forests. 
. . . You will surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones, gor- 
geous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gTay as lichened granite, and 
scarcely bigger than grasshoppers; and they will teach you that scales 
may cover as fine a nature as hair or feather or anything tailored. 

And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among 
all the work of the nature-writers than his characterization of 
the Douglas squirrel of the Western mountains : 

One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this brave little voice 
crymg m the wilderness, observing his many works and ways, and 
listening to his curious language. His musical, piney gossip is savory 
to the ear as balsam to the palate; and though he has not exactly the 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 159 

gift of song, some of liis notes are sweet as those of a linnet — almost 
flute-like in softness; while others prick and tingle like thistles. lie 
is the mocking-bird of squiiTels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song 
like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, 
whistling like blackbirds and sparrows; while in bluff, audacious 
noisiness he is a jay. 

Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, 
climbed the precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosem- 
ite sawmill, and passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more 
wonderful than Thoreau," he said, and he tried long to induce 
him to leave the mountains for the East, and to live in the midst 
of men. But to IMuir the leaving of the Yosemite and the Sierra 
was like leaving God Himself. To him the city was the place 
of unnatural burdens, of money that dulls and kills the finest 
things of the soul, of separation from all that is really vital in the 
life of man. 

His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes 
a scene stand out with sharpness. He is original ; there are in his 
work no traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with 
which he was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often 
there is a rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone 
that can be described only by the word eloquent. In passages 
describing storm or mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excite- 
ment, that are infectious. The prose of John Muir may be 
summed up as sincere and vigorous, without trace of self -con- 
sciousness or of straining for effect. Few writers of any period 
of American literature have within their work more elements of 
promise as they go down to the generations to come. 



Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and 
more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was 
only one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best 
known and most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader aiid 
inspirer. The mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in 
the bulk of its literary product ; it had been a thing of indoors 
and of books: the new after-the-war spirit was masculine even 
at times to coarseness and brutality. ]\Iaurice Tliompson 
(1844-1901), one of the earliest of the new period, perceived 
the bent of the age with clearness. "We are nothing better than 



160 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

refined and enlightened savages," he wrote in 1878. ''The wild 
side of the prism of humanity still offers its pleasures to us. . . . 
Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and mental exer- 
cise combined — play in the best sense — is a requirement of this 
wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and 
the bow is its natural implement." * It was the apology of the 
old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct 
these heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that 
appealed to the imagination and that took its devotees into the 
forests and the swamps, but there was no directing of the resurg- 
ing forces. Baseball and football sprang up in the seventies and 
grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of proportions. Yachting, 
camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in the woods and 
the borders of ci\alization swiftly became popular. The Adiron- 
dacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang 
into new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained 
that The Blameless Prince lay almost dead on the shelves while 
such books as Murray's Adventures in the Wilder^iess sold enor- 
mously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray — "Adirondack 
Murray" — did vie even with Bonner's Ledger in popularity. 
He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic at- 
mosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent 
forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known 
as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There 
is about them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too 
often from the intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley 
"Warner in his In the Wilderness, 1878, and "William H. Gibson 
in such books as Camp Life in the Woods, sympathetically illus- 
trated by their author, were far more sincere and wholesome. 
Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal for a return 
to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the old 
English days, to hunting and trapping and camping — a mascu- 
line, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. 
The earlier phase of the period may be said to have culminated 
in 1882 with the founding of Outing, a magazine devoted wholly 
to activities in the open air. 

The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird 
books. C. C. Abbott's A Naturalist's RamUes About Home, 
1884; Olive Thome Miller's Bird Ways, 1885; Bradford Tor- 

4 The Witchery of Archery, 1878. 



RISE OF THE NATURE WRITERS 161 

rey's Birds in the Bush, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's 
Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889, may be taken a.s representa- 
tive. Bird life and bird ways for a period became a fad; en- 
thusiastic observers sprang up everywhere; scientific treatises 
and check lists and identification guides like Chapman's Uand- 
hook of Birds of Eastern North America, began to appear in 
numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the un- 
usual human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature 
writers were doing for the birds. 

Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little 
is possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalis- 
tic in style and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later 
group, Bradford Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt 
it is already safe to place him next in order after Burroughs and 
Muir. He is more of an artist than Burroughs, and he is more 
literary and finished than Muir. In his attitude toward Nature 
he is like Thoreau — sensitive, sympathetic, reverent. It was he 
who edited the journals of Thoreau in their final form, and it 
was he also who after that experience wrote what is undoubtedly 
the most discriminating study that has yet been made of the 
great mystic naturalist. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

John Burroughs. (1837 .) tiotes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and 

Person, New York, 1867; Wake-Robin, 1871; Winter Simshine, 1875; Birds 
and Poets, 1877; Locusts and Wild Honey, 1879; Pepacton, 1881; Fresh 
Fields, 1884; Signs and Seasons, 188G; Indoor Studies, 1889; liiverby, 
1894; Whitman, a Study, 1896; The Light of Day, 1900; Literary Values, 
1904; Far and Near, 1904; Watjs of Nature, 1905; Leaf and Tendril, 1908; 
Time and Change, 1912; The Summit of the Years, 1913; Our Friend John 
Burroughs. By Clara Barrus. 1914. 

John Muir. (1838-1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series of papers 
in Scrihner's Monthly, 1878; The Mountains of California, 1894; Our 
National Parks, 1901; Stickeen, the Story of a Dog, 1909; My First 
Summer in the Sierra, 1911; The Story of My Boyhood and Yotith, 1913; 
Letters to a Friend, 1915. 

William Hamilton Gibson. (1850-1896.) Camp Life in the Woods 
and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making, 1876; Pastoral Days, or 
Memories of a New England Year, 1882; Tlighicays and Bywajfs, or Saun- 
terings in New England, 1883; Happy Hunting Grounds, a Tribute to the 
Woods and Fields, 1S86; Strolls by Starlight and Stinshine, 1890; Sharp 
Eyes, 1891; Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms, 1895. 

Charles Conrad Abijott. (1843 .) The Stone Age in New Jersey. 



162 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

1876- Primitive Industry, 1881; A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 
1884; Upland and Meadow, 1886; Wasteland Wanderings, 1887; Days out 
of Doors, 1889; Outings at Odd Times, 1890; Recent Rambles, 1892; 
Outings in a Tree-Top, 1894; The Birds About Us, 1894; Notes of the 
Night, 1895; Birdland Echoes, 1896; The Freedom of the Fields, 1898; 
Clear Skies and Cloudy, 1899; In Nature's Realm, 1900. 

"Olive Thoene Miller" — Harriet Mann Miller. (1831 .) Little 

Folks in Feathers and Fur, 1879; Queer Pets at Marcy's, 1880; Bird 
Ways, 1885; In Nesting Time, 1888; Four Handed Folk, 1890; Little 
Brothers of the Air, 1890; Bird-Lover in the West, 1894; Upon the Tree 
Tops, 1896; The First Book of Birds, 1899; True Bird Stories, 1903; 
With the Birds in Maine, 1904; and others. 

Bradford Torrey. (1843-1912.) Birds in the Bush, 1885; A Rambler's 
Lease, 1889; The Foot-Path Way, 1892; A Florida Sketch-Book, 1894; 
Spring Notes from Tennessee, 1896; A World of Green Hills, 1898; Every- 
Day Birds, 1900; Footing It in Franconia, 1900; The Clerk of the Woods, 
1903; Nature's Invitation, 1904; Friends on the Shelf, 1906. 

Florence Merriam Bailey. (1863 .) Bird^ Through an Opera 

Glass, 1889; My Summer in a Mormon Village, 1895; A Birding on a 
Bronco, 1896; Birds of Village and Field, 1898; Handbook of Birds of 
Western United States, 1902. 

Frank Bolles. (1856-1894.) Land of the Lingering Snoiv, 1891; 
At the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New Eng- 
land from July to December, 1893; From Blomidon to Smoky, 1895. 



CHAPTER IX 

WALT WHITMAN 

Whitmau and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid 
century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental move- 
ment, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them 
voices in the wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of 
them unheeded until a new generation had arisen to whom they 
had become but names and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; 
Whitman in 1819, the year of Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman 
Melville, J. G. Holland, Julia Ward Howe, and E. P. Whipple, 
and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Ar- 
thur Hugh Clough. Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his 
first significant volume, in 1855, the year of Hiawatha, of Maud, 
and of Arnold's Poems. He issued it again in 1856 and again 
in 1860 — a strange nondescript book rendered all the more 
strange by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, 
that it had won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most 
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet 
contributed. ... I greet you at the beginning of a great ca- 
reer." But even the compelling name of Emerson could not 
sell the book ; little notice, in fact, was taken of it save as a few 
voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862 Whitman 
became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not so much 
impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his 
death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whit- 
man seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accus- 
tomed to curious phenomena. 

The antecedents and the early training of AMiitman were far 
from literary. He came from a race of Long Island farmers 
who had adhered to one spot for generations. No American was 
ever more completely a product of our own soil. 
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, 
Boru here of parents born here, 
From parents the same, and their parents' parents the same. 

They were crude, vigorous plowmen, unbookish and elemental. 

163 



164 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The father was the first to break from the soil and the ancestral 
environment, but he left it only to become a laborer on buildings 
in the neighboring city of Brooklyn. 

The boyhood of Whitman was passed in the city, though with 
long vacations in the home of his grandparents on Long Island. 
His schooling was brief and desultory. He left the schools at 
twelve to become office boy for a lawyer and from that time on 
he drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, serving for brief 
periods as doctor's clerk, compositor in a country printing office, 
school teacher in various localities, editor and proprietor of a 
rural weekly, stump speaker in the campaign of 1840, editor of 
various small journals, contributor of Hawthornesque stories 
and sketches to papers and magazines, writer of a melodramatic 
novel, and in 1846 editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But he 
could hold to nothing long. In 1848 he was induced by a stranger 
who had taken a fancy to him to go to New Orleans as editor 
of the Crescent newspaper, but within a year he was back again 
in New York, where for the next few years he maintained a half- 
loafing, half-working connection with several papers and peri- 
odicals. 

It was during this period that he made himself so thoroughly 
familiar with the middle and lower strata of New York City 
life. He spent hours of every day riding on Broadway vehi- 
cles and on Fulton ferry boats and making himself boon com- 
panion of all he met. He knew the city as Muir knew the peaks 
and mountain gardens of the Sierra, and he took the same de- 
light in discovering a new specimen of humanity on a boat or 
an omnibus that Muir might take in finding a new plant on an 
Alaska glacier. 

I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky 
Bill, George Storms, Old Eliphant, bis brother, Yomig Eliphant (who 
came af temvard ) , Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Cal- 
lahan, Patsey Dee, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They 
had immense qualities, largely animal — eating, drinking, women — 
greafc personal pride, in their way — perhaps a few slouches here and 
there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their sim- 
ple good will and honor, imder all circumstances.^ 

Almost daily, later ('50 to '60), I cross'd on the boats, often up in 
the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, ac- 

1 Specimen Days. 



WALT WHITMAN 165 

companiments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, under- 
neath — the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. 
Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford 
inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay 
scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day — hurrying, 
splashing sea-tides — the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes. 
. . . My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, Wil- 
liam White, and my young feriy friend, Tom Gere — how well I re- 
member them all.- 

I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport 
with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides the best, 
most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken — the grandest physi- 
cal habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.^ 

The earlier Wliitman is a man par excellence of the city as 
Muir is of the mountains and Thoreau of the woods. 



A jungle of writings has sprung up about Wliitman ; as many 
as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet 
aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perr>' and 
Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. 
Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an 
adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrange- 
ment. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless 
for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscrim- 
inatingly. The ' ' Chants Democratic, ' ' for instance, of the earlier 
editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end 
of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of 
revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every 
period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large 
sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at 
one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is impor- 
tant, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in 
his evolution often tells much concerning his art. 

There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material 
at critical points in AVhitman's life, notably during that forma- 
tive period preceding the first issue of Leaves of Grass. In his 
later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals 
with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put 

2 Specimen Days. 



166 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all auto- 
biographical ; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long 
explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of 
his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway 
rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very or- 
dinary poems and stories and editorials — how ordinary we can 
easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved— 
suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work 
of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue 
of the Amaranth or the Gem would be unlike the book of Amos. 
What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the re- 
sult of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extend- 
ing over a period of years ? Did it come as a sudden inspiration 
or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We 
do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition 
poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his 
soul. At one period we have verses like these : 

We are all docile dough-faces, 

They knead us with the fist. 
They, the dashing Southern lords. 

We labor as they list; 
For them we speak — or hold our tongues, 

For them we turn and twist. 

Then suddenly without warning we have this : 

Free, fresh, savage. 

Fluent, luxuriant, self-content, fond of persons and places, 

Fond of fish-shape Paumanok, where I was bom, 

Fond of the sea — lusty-begotten and various. 

Boy of the Mannahatta, the city of ships, my city, 

Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a new world. 

That is the problem of Walt Whitman, a problem the most 
baffling and the most fascinating in the later range of American 
literature. 

n 

^ There can be little doubt that the primal impulse in the crea- 
tion of Leaves of Grass came from the intellectual and moral un- 
rest of the thirties and the forties. Whitman caught late, per- 
haps latest of all the writers of the period, the Transcendental 



WALT WHITMAN 167 

spirit that had so unsettled America and the rest of the world 
as well. "Wliat a fertility of projects for the salvation of the 
world ! ' ' Emerson had cried in 1844. Who ' ' will ever forget what 
was somewhat vaguely called the 'Transcendental Movement' of 
thirty years ago"? Lowell had asked in 1865. "Apparently 
set astir by Carlyle's essays on the 'Signs of the Times,' and on 
'History,' the final and more immediate impulse seemed to be 
given by 'Sartor Resartus.' At least the republication in Bos- 
ton of that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on Fal- 
staff's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for 
a sudden mental and moral mutiny. . . . The nameless eagle of 
the tree Ygdrasil was about to set at last, and wild-eyed enthusi- 
asts rushed from all sides, eager to thrust under the mystic 
bird that chalk egg from which the newer and fairer creation 
was to be hatched in due time."^ Whitman was a product of 
this ferment. He took its exaggerations and its wild dreams as 
solemn fact. He read Emerson and adopted his philosophy 
literally and completely: "Whoso would be a man must be a 
nonconformist." "He who would gather immortal palms must 
not be hindered by the name of goodness." "Insist on your- 
self; never imitate." "Welcome evermore to gods and men is 
the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide ; him all 
tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our 
love goes out to him." "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to 
that iron string." "With consistency a great soul has simply 
nothing to do, ' ' and so on and on. 

All criticism of Whitman must begin with the fact that he 
was uneducated even to ignorance. He felt rather than 
thought. Of the intellectual life in the broader sense — science, 
analysis, patient investigation — he knew notliing. When he read 
he read tumultuously, without horizon, using his emotions and 
his half conceptions as interpreters. A parallel may be drawn 
between him and that other typical product of the era, ]\Irs. 
Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science cult. Both were 
mystics, almost pathologically so ; both were electric with the urge 
of physical health ; both were acted upon by the transcendental 
spirit of the era ; both were utterly without humor ; and both in 
all seriousness set about to establish a new conception of re- 
ligion. 

3 Works, i: 361, 



168 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion. 

To Whitman the religious leader of an era was its poet. He 
would broaden the conception of the Poet until he made of him 
the leader and the savior of his age. 

The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality. 

His insight and power encircle thing's and the human race, 

He is the gloiy and extract, thus far, of things, and of the human race. 

The singers do not beget— only The Poet begets. 

The singers are welcomed, understood, appear often enough — but rare 

has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of 

poems. 
Not every century, or every five centuries, has contained such a day, 

for all its names. 

With assurance really sublime he announced himself as this 
poet of the new era, this new prophet of the ages : 

Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived 
To be wrestled with. 

I know perfectly well my own egotism, 

I know my oimiivorous words, and I cannot say any less. 

And would fetch you, whoever you are, flush with myself. 

He hails as comrade and fellow savior even Him who was 
crucified : 

We few, equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, 

We, inclosers of all continents, all castes — allower of all theologies, 

Corapassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men. 

We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the dis- 
puters, nor anything that is asserted. 

We hear the bawling and din — we are reached at by divisions, jeal- 
ousies, recriminations on every side, 

They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade. 

Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and 
down, till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the di- 
verse eras, 

Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages 
to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are. 

He too would give his life to the lowly and the oppressed ; he 
too would eat with publicans and sinners ; he too would raise the 
sick and the dying: 

To any one dying— thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door. 
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, 



WALT WHITI^IAN 169 

Let the physician and the pi-iest go home 

I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will. 

despairer, here is my neck, 

By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me. 

1 dilate you with tremendous breath — I buoy you up, 
Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force, 
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. 

Sleep ! I and they keep guard all night, 

Not doubt — not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you, 

I have embraced you. 

The poetic message of Whitman, the new message that was, as 
he believed, "to drop in the earth the germs of a greater re- 
ligion," he summed up himself in the phrase "The greatness of 
Love and Democracy" — Love meaning comradeship, hearty 
"hail, fellow, well met" to all men alike; Democracy meaning 
the equality of all things and all men — en masse. He is to be 
the poet of the East and the West, the North and the South 
alike ; he is to be the poet of all occupations, and of all sorts and 
conditions of men. He salutes the whole world in toto and in 
detail. A great part of Leaves of Grass is taken up with 
enumerations of the universality and the detail of his poetic sym- 
pathy. He covers the nation with the accuracy of a gazetteer, 
and he enumerates its industries and its population, simply that 
he may announce, ' ' I am the poet of these also. ' ' 

The appearance of Whitman marks the first positive resur- 
gence of masculinity in mid-century America. He came as the 
first loud protest against sentimentalism, against Longfellowisra, 
against a prudish drawing-room literature from which all life 
and masculine coarseness had been refined. AVhitman broke into 
the American drawing-room as a hairy barbarian, uncouth and 
unsqueamish, a Goth let loose among ladies, a Vandal smashing 
the bric-a-brac of an over-refined generation. He came in with 
a sudden leap, unlooked-for, unannounced, in all his nakedness 
and vulgarity like a primitive man, and proceeded to soimd his 
barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He mixed high and 
low, blab and divinity, because he knew no better. Like the 
savage that he was he adorned himself with scraps of feathers 
from his reading— fine words: lihertad, camerado, nm femmc, 
amhulanza, enfans d'Adam; half understood fragments of mod- 
em science; wild figures of speech from the Transcendental 
dreamers which he took literally and pushed to their logical limit. 



170 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

And he poured it all out in a melange without coherence or logical 
sequence : poetry and slang, bravado and egotism, trash and di- 
vinity and dirt. At one moment he sings : 

Smile, vohiptuous, eool-breatlied Earth! 

Earth of the shimbering and liquid trees! 

Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountams, misty-topt! 

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue! 

Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! 

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake ! 

Far-swooping elbowed Earth! Rich, apple-blossomed Earth! 

Smile, for Your Lover comes! 

And the next moment be bursts out: 

Earth ! you seem to look for something at my hands, 
Say, old Top-knot! what do you wanf? 

And he does it all honestly, unsmilingly, and ignorantly. It is 
because he had so small a horizon that he seems so to project be- 
yond the horizon. To understand him one must understand first 
his ignorance. 

But if he is a savage, he has also the vigor and dash and 
abounding health of the savage. He enters upon his work with 
unction and perfect abandonment; his lines shout and rush and 
set the blood of his reader thrilling like a series of war whoops. 
His first poem, the ' ' Proto-Leaf , ' ' is, to say the least, exhilarating. 
Read straight through aloud with resonant voice, it arouses in 
the reader a strange kind of excitement. The author of it was 
young, in the very tempest of perfect physical health, and he had 
all of the youth 's eagerness to change the course of things. His 
work is as much a gospel of physical perfection as is Science and 
Health. It is full of the impetuous passions of youth. It is not 
the philosophizing of an old savant, or of an observer experi- 
enced in life, it is the compelling arrogance of a young man in 
full blood, sure of himself, eager to reform the universe. The 
poems indeed are 

Health chants — joy chants — robust chants of young men. 

The physical as yet is supreme. Of the higher laws of sacrifice, 
of self-effacement, of character that builds its own aristocracy and 
draws lines through even the most democratic mass, the poet 
knows really nothing. He may talk, but as yet it is talk without 
basis of experience. 



WALT WHITMAN 171 

The poems are youthful in still another way : they are of the 
young soil of America ; they are American absolutely, in spirit, 
in color, in outlook. Like Thoreau, Whitman never had all his 
life long any desire to visit any other land than his own. He 
was obsessed, intoxicated, with America. He began his reckon- 
ing of time with the year 1775 and dated his first book "the year 
80 of the States." A large section of his poems is taken up with 
loving particularization of the land— not of New England and 
New York alone, but of the whole of it, every nook and comer 
of it. For the first time America had a poet who was as broad 
as her whole extent and who could dwell lovingly on every river 
and mountain and village from Atlantic to Pacific. 

Take my leaves, America! 

Make welcome for them evei-j'wliere, for they are your own offspring. 

Surround them. East and West! 

He glories in the heroic deeds of America, the sea fight of John 
Paul Jones, the defense of the Alamo, and his characterization 
of the various sections of the land thrills one and exhilarates one 
like a glimpse of the flag. What a spread, continent-wide, free- 
aired and vast — "Far breath 'd land, Arctic braced! Mexican 
breezed!" — one gets in the crescendo beginning: 

the lands! 

Lands scorning invaders! Interlinked, food-yielding lands! 

It is the first all American thrill in our literature. 

The new literary form adopted by Whitman was not a delib- 
erate and studied revolt from the conventional forms of the 
times: it was rather a discovery of Walt Whitman by himself. 
Style is the man: the "easily written, loose-fingered chords" 
of his chant, unrimed, lawless ; this was Whitman himself. How 
he found it or when he found it, matters not greatly. It is possi- 
ble that he got a hint from his reading of Ossian or of the Bible 
or of Eastern literature, but we know that at the end it came 
spontaneously. He was too indolent to elaborate for himself 
a deliberate metrical system, he was too lawless of soul to be 
bound by the old prosody. Whatever he wrote must loaf along 
with, perfect freedom, unpolished, haphazard, incoherent. The 
adjective that best describes his style is loose — not logical, ram- 
bling, suggestive. His mind saunters everywhither and does not 



172 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

concentrate. In other words, it is an uneducated mind, an un- 
focused mind, a primitive mind. 

The result was that, despite Whitman's freshness and force 
and stirring Americanism, he made little impression in the decade 
following the first Leaves of Grass. Emerson's commendation 
of him had been caused by his originality and his uncouth power, 
but none of the others of the mid-century school could see any- 
thing in the poems save vulgarity and egotistic posing. Lowell 
from first to last viewed him with aversion ; Whittier burned the 
book at once as a nasty thing that had soiled him. The school 
of Keats and Tennyson, of Longfellow and Willis, ruled Amer- 
ican literature with tyrannic power, and it was too early for 
successful revolution. 

Ill 

The Civil War found Whitman young; it left him an old 
man. There seems to have been no midde-age period in his 
life. He had matured with slowness; at forty, when he issued 
the 1860 Leaves of Grass, he was in the very prime of youth, 
the physical still central. There had been no suffering in his 
life, no grip of experience; he spoke much of the soul, but the 
soul was still of secondary importance. He wrote to his mother 
in 1862 : 

I believe I weigh about two hundred, and as to my face (so scarlet) 
and my beard and neck, they are terrible to behold. I fancy the reason 
I am able to do some good in the hospitals among the poor languishing 
and wounded boys, is that I am so large and well — indeed like a great 
wild buffalo, with much hair. Many of the soldiers are from the West, 
and far North, and they take to a man that has not the bleached, shiny 
and shaven cut of the cities and the East.^ 

The world of the 1860 Leaves of Grass is a world as viewed by a 
perfectly healthy young man, who has had his way to the full. 
The appeal of it is physiological rather than spiritual. It ends 
the first period of "^liitman's poetical life. 

His next book, Drum-Taps, came in 1866. Between the two 
had come the hospital experience of 1862-1865, from which had 
emerged the Wliitman of the later period. 

ITe had been drawn into this hospital experience, as into every- 
thing else in his life, almost by accident. It had come to him 

4 The ^Yonnd■Drcsser. 



WALT WHITMAN 173 

after no hard-fought battle with himself; it was the result of 
no compelling convictions. The war had progressed for a year 
before it assumed concrete proportions for him. It required the 
news that his brother was lying desperately wounded at Fred- 
ericksburg to move his imagination. When he had arrived at 
the front and had found his brother in no serious condition after 
all, he had drifted almost by accident into the misery of the 
ambulance trains and the hospitals, and before he had realized 
it, he was in the midst of the army nurses, working as if he had 
volunteered for the service. And thus he had drifted on to the 
end of the war, a self-appointed hospital worker, touching and 
helping thousands of sinking lives. 

And he gave during those three years not only his youth but 
also his health of body. He was weakened at length with ma- 
laria and infected with blood poisoning from a wound that he had 
dressed. Moreover, the experience drained him on the side of his 
emotions and his nervous vitality until he went home to become 
at last paralytic and neurotic. The strain upon him he has de- 
scribed with a realism that unnerves one : 

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound. 
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so 

offensive, 
While the attendant stands beside me holding the tray and pail. 
I am faithful, I do not give out, 

The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen. 
These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast a 

fire, a burning flame ) . 

The war allowed Whitman to put into practice all his young 
manhood 's dream of saviorship. It turned him from a preacher 
into a prophet and a man of action, one who took his earlier mes- 
sage and illustrated it at every point with works. It awakened 
within him a new ideal of life. He had been dealing heretofore 
with words: 

Words ! book- words ! What are you 1 

Words no more, for harken and see. 

My song- is there in the open air, and I must sing. 

With the banner and pennant a-flapping. 
No longer does he exult in his mere physical body. Lines like 
these he now" edits from his early editions : 
How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems for these States? 



174 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Also lines like these: 

to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! 
to level occupations and the sexes ! to bring all to common ground ! 
adhesiveness! 

the pensive aching to be together, — ^you know not why, and I know 

not why. 

He omits everywhere freely now from the early editions, not 
from the "Children of Adam," however, though Emerson ad- 
vised it with earnestness. The Whitmans were an obstinate race. 
"As obstinate as a Whitman," had been a degree of compari- 
son; and here was one of them who had taken a position before 
the world and had maintained it in the face of persecution. Re- 
treat would be impossible ; but it is noteworthy that he wrote no 
more poems of sex and that he put forth no more of his tall talk 
and braggadocio. Swiftly he had become the poet of the larger 
life: the immaterial in man, the soul. 

Drum-Taps, 1866, gives us the first glimpse of this new Whit- 
man. The tremendous poem, ' ' Rise, O Days, from Your Fathom- 
less Deeps, ' ' marks the transition. In it he declares that he had, 
with hunger of soul, devoured only what earth had given him, 
that he had sought to content himself simply with nature and the 
material world. 

Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious. 
He does not condemn this earlier phase of his development : 

'T was well, soul — 't was a good preparation you gave me. 

Now we advance our latest and ampler hunger to till. 

Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us. 

Now for the first time he realizes the meaning of Democracy, the 
deep inner meaning of Man and America. 

Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only 

half satisfied. 
One doubt nauseous undulatmg like a snake, erawFd on the ground 

before me, 
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing 

low; 
The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the certainties 

suitable to me, 
Hungenng, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's 

dauntlessness, 

1 refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only. 



WALT WHITMAN 175 

I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire— on the water and air I 

waited long; 
But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted, 
I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my cities electric, 
I have lived to behold man burst forth. 

It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him 
proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will 
sing of Men — men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant 
souls. Drum-Taps fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new 
life. America has risen at last — one feels it in every line. The 
book gives more of the actual soul of the great confiict and of the 
new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. 
"Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos 
that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to 
parents; ''The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost 
terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! 
Beat ! Drums ! ' ' arouses like a bugle call ; such sketches as * * Cav- 
airy Crossing a Ford, " " Bivouac on a Mountain Side, ' ' and ' ' A 
]\Iarch in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are 
full of the thrill and the excitement of war ; and finally the poems 
in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When 
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom 'd," "0 Captain! My Cap- 
tain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the 
highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English. 

IV 

In June, 1865, after he had sensed for a short time as a clerk 
in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been 
discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent 
book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. 
D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in Sep- 
tember the same year a pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, 
defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing 
him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extrava- 
gance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable 
one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. 
It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be 
original and intensely American. 

It [Leaves of Grass] is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely 
American, autoehthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe 



176 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our 
own land, and of its Present and Future ; the strong and haughty psalm 
of the Republic. There is not one other book, 1 care not whose, of 
which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. 
Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and 
substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The 
shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. 
Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word 
— colonial — comprehends and stamps our literature. ... At most, our 
best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the 
immense and absolute sunrise ! It is all our own ! The nation is in it ! 
In form a series of chants, m substance it is an epic of America. It is 
distinctly and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, 
without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and 
popular life. 

The defense fell for the most part on deaf ears. It had been 
Whitman's dream that the great poet of democracy was to be 
the idol of the common people, the poet loved and read even by 
the illiterate. 

The woodman that takes his ax and jug with him shall take me with 

him all day, 
The farm-boy, plowing in the field, feels good at the sound of my voice. 

But the common people heard him not gladly : they preferred 
Longfellow. The American average man — "en masse" — sees no 
poetry in him. Moreover, he has been rejected very largely by 
the more educated. It has been his curious experience to be 
repudiated by democratic America and to be accepted and hailed 
as a prophet by the aristocratic intellectual classes of England 
and of Europe generally. Swinburne, W. M. Rossetti, Symonds, 
Dowden, Saintsbury, Tennyson, and very many others accepted 
him early and at full value, as did also Freiligrath, Schmidt, 
and Bjornson. A cult early sprang up about him, one composed 
largely of mystics, and revolutionists, and reformers in all fields. 

In 1871, Whitman issued what unquestionably is his most 
notable prose work, Democratic Vistas. It is pitched in major 
key: it swells O'Connor's piping note into a trumpet blast. 
Boldly and radically it called for a new school of literature. 
The old is outgrown, it cried ; the new is upon us ; make ready 
for the great tide of Democratic poetry and prose that even now 
is sweeping away the old landmarks. 

To the new era it was what Emerson's American Scholar was 



WALT WHITMAN 177 

to the period that had opened in the thirties. It was our last 
great declaration of literary independence. Emerson, the Har- 
vard scholar, last of a long line of intellectual clergymen, had 
pleaded for the aristocracy of literature, the American scholar, 
the man thinking his own thoughts, alone, the set-apart man of 
his generation; Whitman pleaded for the democracy of litera- 
ture, for an American literature that was the product of the 
mass, a literature of the people, for the people, and by the people. 
Emerson had spoken as an oracle: ''What crowded and breath- 
less aisles ! What windows clustering with eager heads ! ' ' Whit- 
man was as one crying in the wilderness, uncouth, unheeded 
save by the few. Emerson was the clarion voice of Harvard; 
Whitman was the voice of the great movement that so soon was 
to take away the scepter from Harvard and transfer it upon the 
strong new learning of the West. His message was clear and it 
came with Carlyle-like directness: 

Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the People, and, 
whatever may be said, does not to-day. 

Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, Avith closest, 
amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, 
and the clear idea of a class, of 6iative authors, literati, far different, 
far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modem, fit to cope 
with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American 
mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life. 

He has this to say of the poets who thus far had voiced 
America : 

Touch'd by the national test, or tried by the standards of democratic 
personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, 
artist, lecturer, or what-not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever 
erect and active, j)ervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the 
land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel little crea- 
tures Amei-ican poets? Do you temn that perpetual, pistareen, paste- 
pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hoar, 
echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh 
of the Genius of these States. 

America has not been free. She has echoed books; she has 
looked too earnestly to the East. 

America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She 
seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, 
&c., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are 
but exiles and exotics here. 



178 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Our literature must be American in spirit and in background, 
and only American. 

What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local 
courage, sanity, of our own — the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, 
real mental and physical facts. Southerners, &c., in the body of our 
literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always instead, a 
parcel of dandies and ennuyes, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, 
who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, 
tinkling rimes, the five-hundredth importation — or whimpering and 
crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and 
forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, 
current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest 
passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparalleFd rapidity and 
magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering 
new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the 
daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them, 
soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest. 

America demands a poetry that is bold, modem, and all-surrounding 
and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or 
the modem, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must 
bend its %dsion toward the future, more than the past. Like America, 
it must extricate itself from even the gTeatest models of the past, and, 
while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the prod- 
ucts of its own democratic spirit only. 

Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought 
back by the same power that caused her departure — restored with new 
sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, 
this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading ^aews, 
are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has in 
the past, and does the present. 

The book came winged with a double message: it was a de- 
fense and an explanation of Walt Whitman, the poet of democ- 
racy, and it was the call for a new era in American literature. 
In both aspects it was notable, notable as Wordsworth's early 
prefaces were notable. It was both an effect and a cause. The 
same impulse that launched it launched also Thoreau and the 
nature school, Bret Harte and the Pike County balladists, Mark 
Twain and the vulgarians, Howells and realism, and all the 
great wave of literature of locality. Its effect and the effect of 
Leaves of Grass that went with it has been a marked one. After 
these two books there could be no more dilettanteisra in art, no 
more art for mere art's sake, no more imitation and subservience 
to foreign masters ; the time had come for a literature that was 



WALT WHITMAN 179 

genuine and compelling, one that was American both in message 
and in spirit. 



1871 was the culminating year of Whitman's literary life. 
He was at the fullness of his powers. His final attack of paralysis 
was as yet a year away. For the exhibition of the American 
Institute he put the message of Democratic Vistas into poetic 
form — "After All, not to Create Only" — a glorious invitation 
to the muses to migrate to America: 

Placard "Remov'd" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, 

a perfect hexameter line it will be noted, as also this : 

Ended, deeeas'd through time, her voice by Castaly's fountain. 

And the same year he put forth an enlarged and enriched Leaves 
of Grass, including in it the splendid "Passage to India," cele- 
brating the opening of the Suez Canal, a poem that is larger 
than the mere geographic bounds of its subject, world-wide as 
they were, for it is a poem universe-wide, celebrating the tri- 
umphs of the human soul. 

We too take ship, soul, 

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, 

Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, 

Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, sou] ), 

Caroling free, singing our song of God. 

Passage to more than India! 

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights'? 
soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? 
Disportest thou on waters such as those? 
Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? 
Then have thy bent unleash'd. 

The poems grouped around this splendid outburst, as indeed 
all the rest of his poems until illness and age began to dim his 
powers, are pitched in this major key. No poet in any time ever 
maintained himself longer at such high levels. His poems which 
he entitled "Wliispers of Heavenly Death," are all of the upper 
air and the glory of the released soul of man. Not even Shelley 
has more of lyric abandon and pure joy than Whitman in such 
songs as "Barest Thou Now, Soul": 



180 AMEKICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Then we burst forth, we float, 

In Time and Space, soul, prepared for them, 

Equal, equipt at last (0 joy! fruit of all!) them to fulfil, soul 

And what deeps and abysses in a lyric like this : 

A noiseless patient spider, 

I mark'd where on a little promontoiy it stood isolated, 

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast suiTomiding, 

If launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, 

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. 

And you, my soul, where you stand. 
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, 
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to con- 
nect them, 
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, 
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, my soul ! 

And then at last, paralyzed and helpless, his work done, the body 
he had gloried in slipping away from him, there came that mag- 
nificent outburst of faith and optimism that throws a glory over 
the whole of American poetry, the "Prayer of Columbus": 

My terminus near, 

The clouds already closing hi upon me, 

The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost, 

I yield my ships to Thee. 

]\Iy hands, my limbs grow neiweless, 

My brain feels raek'd, bewildered, 

Let the old timbers part, I will not part, 

I will cling fast to Thee, God, though the waves 

buffet me. 
Thee, Thee at least I know. 

Sometime the poems of Whitman will be arranged in the order 
in which he wrote them, and then it will be seen that the poems 
by which he is chiefly judged — the chants of the body, the long 
catalogues of things (reduced greatly by the poet in his later 
editings), the barbaric yawp and the egotism — belong to only 
one brief period in his literary development; that in his later 
work he was the poet of the larger life of man, the most positive 
singer of the human soul in the whole range of English litera- 
ture. If the earlier Wliitman is the singer of a type of democ- 
racy that does not exist in America except as an abstract theory, 
the later ^Tiitman is the singer of the universal heart of man. 



WALT WHIT]\IAN 181 

The Whitman that will endure emerged from the furnace of tlie 
Civil War. In his own words : 

Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, 
Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.^ 

And again, 

I know very well that my "Leaves" could iiot possibly have emerged 
or been fashion'd or completed, from any other era than the latter half 
of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than democratic America, 
and from the absolute triumph of the national Union arms.'' 

He is not always easy reading; he is not always consecutive 
and logical. He said himself that the key to his style was sug- 
gestiveness. 

I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently 
with my scheme. The reader will alvpays have his or her part to do, 
just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any 
theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere 
of the theme or thought — there to pursue your own flight. 

He is oracular ; he talks darkly, like the priestess in the temple, 
in snatches and Orphic ejaculations, and we listen with eagerness. 
Had he been as clear and as consecutive as Longfellow he would 
not have had at all the vogue that has been his. Somehow he gives 
the impression constantly to his reader, as he gave it in earlier 
years to Thoreau, that there is something superhuman about him. 
He is a misty landscape illuminated by lightning flashes. We 
feel that we are near lofty mountains; now and then we catch 
glimpses of a snowy peak, but only for a moment. The fitful roll 
of the thunder excites us and the flashes sometimes terrify, and 
the whole effect of the experience is on the side of the feelings. 
There is little clear vision. Or, perhaps, a better figure : taking 
his entire work we have the great refuse heap of the universe. 
He shows it to us with eagerness ; nothing disgusts him, nothing 
disconcerts him. Now he pulls forth a diamond, now a potsherd, 
and he insists that both are equally valuable. He is joyous at 
every return of the grappling hook. Are not all together in the 
heap; shall the diamond say to the potsherd, I am better than 
thou? 

6 Wovemher Boughs. 

6 A Backwa/rd Glance o'er TraveVd Roads. 



182 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

He was early touched by the nature movement of the mid cen- 
tury. With half a dozen poems he has made himself the leading 
American poet of the sea. In all of his earlier work there 
breathes the spirit of the living out-of-doors until he may be 
ranked with Thoreau and IMuir and Burroughs. It was the 
opinion of Burroughs that ' ' No American poet has studied Ameri- 
can nature more closely than "Whitman, or is more cautious in 
his uses of it." He is not the poet of the drawing-room — he is 
the poet of the vast sweep of the square miles, of the open sky, of 
the cosmos. ' ' Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, ' ' 
he contended ; " is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature — 
just as much as art is." And it was his mission, as he conceived 
it, "to bring people back from their persistent strayings and 
sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original con- 
crete." 

He is not a scientist with Nature ; he does not know enough to 
be a scientist, and his methods and cast of mind are hopelessly 
unscientific. He is simply a man who feels. 

You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about 
birds and trees and flowers and water craft ; a certain free margin, and 
even vagueness — perhaps ignorance, credulity — helps your enjoyment 
of these things, and of the sentiment of featber'd, wooded, river, or 
marine nature generally. I repeat it — don't want to know too exactly, 
or the reasons why. 

Such a paragraph is worth a chapter of analysis, and so also 
is a poem like this : 

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, 

"When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

"When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and meas- 
ure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much 
applause iii the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick. 

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, 

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. 

His intellect is not so developed as his emotions. He cannot 
think ; he can feel. And after all is not the essence of all poetry, 
of all the meanings of life, of the soul, of Nature in its message 
to man, a thing not of the intellect but of the sensitive spirit of 
man? 



WALT WHITMAN 183 

VI 

Of Whitman's poetic form there is still much to learn. In its 
earlier phases there was a sprawliness about it that at times was 
almost fatal to poetic effects, but he grew more metric with every 
edition and more and more pruned out the worst of his lines, such 
for instance as this : 

Or, another time, in warm weather, out iii a boat, to lift the lobster- 
pots, where they are smik with heavy stones (I know the buoys). 

His lines are not prose, even the worst of them. There is a roll 
about them, a falling of the voice at stressed intervals, an alternate 
time-beat, crude at times, violated often, yet nevertheless an 
obedience to law. 

It is impossible for any poet, however lawless and apathetic 
to rules, to compose year after year without at last falling into a 
stereotyped habit of manner, and evolving a metric roll that is 
second nature. That Wliitman was not conscious of any metric 
law within himself goes without saying. He believed that he was 
as free as the tides of the ocean and the waves that rolled among 
the rocks — lawless, unconfined. 

I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but I 
confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes cau.2;ht my- 
self in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of 
them but negative advantages — that they should never impede me, and 
never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume 
any mastery over me.''' 

But a study of Whitman reveals the fact that certain laws did 
more and more assume mastery over him. With every year the 
time-beat of his poems grew increasingly hexametric. One may 
go through his later poems and find on the average a full hex- 
ameter line on every page. I quote at random : 

To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me. 

How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother? 

Behold thy tields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains. 

His ear unconsciously seemed to demand the roll of the dactyl, 
then a cesura after from five to seven beats, then a closing roll 

7 Preface to Oood-ly My Fancy. 



184 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

longer or shorter as his mood struck him. The greater number 
of his later lines open as if the line was to be a hexameter : ' ' Over 
the breast of the spring," "Passing the yellow-spear 'd wheat," 
"Passing the apple tree blows," "Coffin that passes through 
lakes, ' ' and so on and on. 

But one can make a broader statement. The total effect of the 
poems after 1870, like the ' ' Song of the Redwood, ' ' for instance, 
is hexametric, though few of the lines may be hexameters as they 
stand. One might arrange this song like this : 

A California song, | a prophecy and indirection, 

A thought impalpable | to breathe as air, a chorus 

Of drj'ads, fading departing. | or hamadryads departing, 

A murmuring, fateful giant [ voice out of the earth and sky, 

Voice of a mighty dying | tree in the redwood forest 

Dense. Farewell my brethren, | Farewell earth and sky, 

Farewell ye neighboring waters, | my time has ended, my term 

Has come along the northern coast | just back from the rockbound shore. 

And the caves in the saline air | from the sea in the Mendocino 

Country with the surge for base | and accompaniment low and hoarse, 

With crackling blows of axes | sounding musically driven 

By strong arms driven deep | by the sharp tongues of the axes. 

There in the redwood forest | dense I beard the mighty 

Tree in its death chant chanting. 

Crude hexameters these undoubtedly, requiring much wrenching 
and eliding at times, yet for all that as one reads them aloud one 
cannot escape the impression that the total effect is hexametric. 
May it not be that the primal time beat for poetry is the hex- 
ameter, and that the prehistoric poets evolved it spontaneously 
even as the creator of Leaves of Grass evolved it ? 

VII 

To insist that Whitman has had small influence on later poetry 
because none of the later poets has made use of his chant is feeble 
criticism. No poet even can make use of his verse form without 
plagiarism, for his loose-finger^'^d chords and his peculiar time- 
beat, his line-lengths, his wrevnched hexameters — all this was 
"Whitman himself. In all other ways he enormously influenced 
his age. His realism, his concrete pictures, his swing and free- 
dom, his Americanism, his insistence upon message, ethic pur- 
pose, absolute fidelity to the here hnid now rather than to books 
of the past — all have been enormously influential. He is the 



WALT WHITMAN 185 

central figure of the later period, the voice in the wilderness that 
hailed its dim morning and the strong singer of its high noon. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Walt Whitman. (1819-1892.) During the lifetime of the poet there 
were issued ten editions of Leaves of Grass, with the following dates: 
1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881, 1888, 1889, 1891. 

Among his other publications were the following: 1866. Drum-Taps; 
1870. Passage to India; 1871. Democratic Vistas; 1875. Memoranda 
During the War; 1876. Specimen Days and Collect; 1876. Tico Riv- 
ulets; 1888. November Boughs; 1891. Good Bye My Fancy. 

Among the works published after his death the most important are: 
1897. Calamus: a Series of Letters Written During the Years 1S6S-18S0 
to a Young Friend. Edited by R. M. Bucke; 1898. The Wound Dresser: 
Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the 
Rebellion. Edited by R. M. Bucke; 1904. Diary in Canada. Edited by 
W. S. Kennedy; 1910. Complete Prose Works, 10 vols, with biographical 
matter by O. L. Triggs, 1902; Poems, with biographical introduction by 
John Burroughs, 1902. 

Among the great mass of biographies and studies may be mentioned the 
following: The Good Gray Poet, W. D. O'Connor, 1865; Notes on Walt 
Whitman as Poet and Person, John Burroughs, 1867; Whitman: a Study, 
John Burroughs, 1893; In Re Walt Whitman, R. 11. Bucke, H. Traubcl, 
and T. B. Harned, 1893; Walt Whitman, the Man, T. Donaldson, 1896; 
Walt Whitman: a Study, J. Addington Symonds, 1897; Walt Whitman 
{the Camden Sage) as Religious and Moral Teacher: a Study, W. Norman 
Guthrie, 1897; Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, E. P. Gould, 1900; 
Walt Whitman's Poetry, E. G. Holmes, 1901 ; Walt Whitman the Poet of 
the Wider Selfhood, M. T. Maynard, 1903; Walt Whitman, J. Piatt, 1904; 
A Life of Walt Whitman, Henry B. Binns, 1905; A Vagabond in Litera- 
ture, A. Rickett, 1906; Walt Whitman; His Life and Works, Bliss Perry, 
1906; Days with Walt Whitman. With Some Notes on His Life and Work, 
Edward Carpenter, 1906; With Walt Whitman in Camden {March 2S- 
July Ik, 1880), Horace Traubel, 1906; Walt Whitman. English jNIen of 
Letters Series. George Rice Carpenter, 1909; Approach to ^Valt Whitman, 
C. E. Noyes, 1910; Democracy and Poetry, F. B. Gummcre, 1911; Walt 
Whitman, Basil de Selincourt, 1914. A bibliography of Whitman's writings 
is appended to O. L. Triggs's Selections, 1898. 



CHAPTER X 

THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

The nineteenth century both in Europe and America was a 
period of revolt, of breakings away from tradition, of voices in 
the wilderness. It was the age of Byron and Shelley, of Carlyle 
and Tolstoy, of Heine and Hugo. Literature came everywhere 
as the voice of revolution. It rang with protest — Dickens and 
George Eliot, Kingsley, Whittier, and Mrs. Stowe; it dreamed 
of a new social era — Fourier and the sons of Rousseau in France, 
the Transcendentalists in America; it let itself go in romantic 
abandon and brought back in a flood feeling and sentiment — 
the spdtromantiker and Bulwer-Lytton and Longfellow. Every- 
where conviction, intensity, travail of soul. 

The school died in the last quarter of the century consumed of 
its own impetuous spirit, and it left no heirs. A feminine age 
had come, an age of convention and of retrospect. The romantic 
gave way to the inevitable classic ; the hot passion of revolt to the 
cool fit of deliberate art. In America, the New England school 
that had ruled the mid years of the century became reminiscent, 
fastidious, self-contained, to awake in sudden realization that it 
no longer was a power, that its own second generation were women 
led by Aldrich, James, Howells, immigrants from New York 
and the West. The early leaders, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, all 
intensity and conviction, had been replaced by the school of de- 
liberate workmen who had no message for their times, only tech- 
nique and brilliancy. 



This reaction from the New England school can be studied no- 
where more convincingly than in the personalities and work of 
Henry James, father and son. The elder James, companion of 
Carlyle and Emerson and Alcott, disciple and interpreter of 
Swedenborg and Sandeman, was a typical product of the mid- 
century school— mystical, intense, concerned with the inner rather 
than the other aspects of man. "Henry James was true com- 
186 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 187 

fort," Emerson wrote in his diary in 1850; "wise, gentle, pol- 
ished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun. ' ' He pur- 
sued no profession, but like Alcott devoted his life to philosophy 
and to literature. He wrote for the few a small handful of books, 
mostly forgotten now, though he who would road them will find 
them clothed in a richness of style and a felicity of expression 
that reminds one of the prose of the greater periods of English 
literature.^ 

The son of this mid-century genius, Henry James, Jr., cultured, 
cold, scientific, disciple of Turgenieff, of Flaubert and Daudet, 
Maupassant and Zola — ''grandsons of Balzac" — stands as the 
type of the "later manner," the new school that wrote without 
message, that studied with intensity the older models, that talked 
evermore of its "art." 

' ' We know very little about a talent, ' ' this younger James has 
written in his essay on Stevenson, "till we know where it grew 
up," The James family, we know, grew up outside the New 
England environment, in the State of New York — first at Albany, 
where the future novelist was born in 1843, then until he was 
twelve in New York City. But this in reality tells us nothing. 
The boy grew up in London rather than New York. The father 
had inherited means that permitted a retired and scholarly life. 
Following the birth of Henry, his second son, he had taken his 
family for a year and a half to England, and he had come back, 
both he and his wife, to quote his son's words, "completely Euro- 
peanized." "Had all their talk for its subject, in my infant 
ears, that happy time ? — did it deal only with London and Picca- 
dilly and the Green Park? ... I saw my parents homesick, as 
I conceived, for the ancient order. " ^ He grew up in the presence 
of imported books and papers, the smell of whose ink fresh from 
London and the Strand fed his imagination. 

Even his playmates transported him into the old world. It 
was one Louis De Coppet, a small boy, "straight from the Lake 
of Geneva," that first really aroused in him "the sense of Europe 
. . . that pointed prefigurement of the manners of 'Europe,' 

1 James's chief works are Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Rcmarlcs 
on the Gospels, Moralism and Christianity, The Nature of Evil, Substance 
and Shadoics, The Secret of Swedenborfi, What is the StatcF The Church 
of Christ, Christianity the Lyric of Creation, and Literary Remains, edited 
by William James. 

2 A Small Boy and Others. 



188 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young 
allegiance was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. 
His the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden 
nail. It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, 
however scant, of another world." ^ AVhile other lads were read- 
ing their juveniles, the young James was poring over Punch. 
"From about 1850 to 1855," he writes in his essay on Du 
Maurier, speaking of himself in the third person, "he lived, in 
imagination, no small part of the time, in the world represented 
by the pencil of Leech. . . . These things were the features of a 
world which he longed so to behold that the familiar woodcuts 
grew at last as real to him as the furniture of his home. ' ' 



Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement 
and rare culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his 
whole boyhood like an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from 
the world without, as from something coarse and degrading. He 
was not allowed to attend the public schools. ' ' Considering with 
much pity our four stout boys, ' ' the father wrote to Emerson in 
1849, ' ' who have no playroom within doors and import shocking 
bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it 
would n 't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allow- 
ing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous 
education as they cannot get here. ' ' * 

The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. 
In the interiyn tutors were employed for his education who in- 
structed him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him 
always to take apparently the paths of his preference. In these 
same paths he seems to have continued during the four years of 
his residence abroad with his parents in London, Geneva, Bou- 
logne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness he avoided, all sharp- 
ness of discipline — mathematics, examinations. He would sit, 
boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement. ' ' The 
whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have pos- 
sessed mentally — even if I had but just turned twelve."^ 

One does not understand Henry James who neglects this forma- 

3 A Small Boy and Others. 

4 'Notes of a Son and Brother. 
c A Small Boy and Others. 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 189 

tive period of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a 
dreamer, with his heart in the lands of culture, dissatislied with 
the rush and rudeness that were preparing a new world for its 
future. He was too frail in health to enter the armies which 
soon were recruiting about him for the great war ; he had no in- 
clination, because of his father's prejudice, to undertake a col- 
lege course ; he shrank from the usual professions open to young 
men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at the Har- 
vard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a 
legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He 
would woo the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course 
the muse of prose fiction — never for the briefest hour in my case 
the presumable, not to say the presuming, the much-taking-for- 
granted muse of rime, with whom I had never had, even in 
thought, the faintest flirtation." For this profession he trained 
himself as deliberately and as laboriously as if it were the violin 
that he was to master, or the great organ. He read industriously, 
especially in the French; he resided now in Boston, where his 
father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like 
Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he 
would live at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late 
seventies, he took up his residence permanently abroad to return 
only as a rare visitant. 

Ill 

Henry James more than any other American author stands for 
specialization, for a limited field cultivated intensively and ex- 
clusively. Poetry, as he has explained, was no part of liis en- 
dowment ; he never attempted it even at the age when all men 
are poets; romance never attracted him. He approached his 
chosen field of prose fiction deliberately as a scientist, and pre- 
pared himself for it as a man studies medicine. He began as he 
ended — more crude in his art to be sure, more conventional, more 
youthful in thought and diction, yet not fundamentally different 
from his final manner. 

His first published work, The Story of a Year, which appeared 
in the March, 1865, number of the Atlantic, at first reading seems 
little different from the hundreds of tales of the Civil War that 
were appearing everywhere during the period. It is full of a 
young man 's smartness and literary affectations : "In early May, 



190 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

two years ago, a young couple I wot of, ' ' etc. ' ' Good reader, this 
narrative is averse to retrospect," etc. And yet the story, de- 
spite its youtlifulness, contains all the elements that we now asso- 
ciate wdth the fiction of Henry James. It is first of all a slight 
story — not so slight as some of the later work, but nevertheless a 
mere episode expanded into a novelette ; furthermore, it was writ- 
ten not so much for the displaying of movement of incident as 
for the analysis of movements of feeling and the growth of ele- 
ments of character: "I have to chronicle," he says at one point, 
"another silent transition." Then too its ending suggests the 
French school: 

"No, no, no," she almost shrieked, turning about in the path. "I 
forbid you to follow me." 
But for all that he went in. 

We stand uncertain, startled, piqued — then the suggestion 
comes surging over us : Perhaps the author means that she mar- 
ried him after all ! Could she do it ? Did she do it ? And then 
we find with a thrill of surprise that he has given us the full 
answer in his previous analysis of her character. It is finesse, it 
is the careful adjustment of parts, it is deliberate art. 

There are other characteristics in the story that were to mark 
all the work of James. The tale, for instance, leaves us unmoved. 
"We admire its brilliancy, but at no point does it grip us with its 
tragedy or its comedy. The faithlessness of the heroine and the 
death of the hero alike leave us cold. We do not care. Sym- 
pathy, the sympathy of comprehension, that sympathy that en- 
ters into the little world the author has created and for a time 
loses itself as if it were actually native there — of this there is 
nothing. It is all objective, external phenomena observed and 
recorded on a pad — a thing alone of the intellect. 

That James should have followed this story with an essay on 
' ' The Novels of George Eliot' ' is no mere coincidence. How com- 
pletely he had saturated himself with all the work of the great 
English sibyl, appears on every page. Her faithfulness to her 
material, her vivid photographs, her devotion to science which 
little by little crushed out her woman's heart, her conception of 
the novel as the record of a dissection — the reactions of human 
souls under the scalpel and the microscope, her materialism that 
refused all testimony save that of the test-tube and the known 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 191 

reagents, that reduced man to a problem in psychology — all this 
made its reflex upon the young student. He too became a scien- 
tist, taking nothing for granted, stripping himself of all illusions, 
relegating the ideal, the intuitive, the spiritual to the realm of the 
outgrown; he too became a taker of notes — "The new school of 
fiction in France is based very much on the taking of notes, ' ' he 
remarks in his essay on Daudet. "The library of the great 
Flaubert, of the brothers Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the 
writer of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a 
library of memorandum-books.""' In his earlier work at least, 
he was George Eliot with the skill and finesse of ^Maupassant, 
and he may be summed up with his whole school in the words he 
has put into the mouth of his own Anastasia Blumenthal: "It 
was meager," he makes her say of the singing of Adelina Patti, 
' ' it was trivial, it lacked soul. You can 't be a great artist with- 
out a great passion. ' ' 

IV 

During the first period of his literary life, the period that ended 
somewhere in the early nineties, James took as the subject of his 
study that vagrom area that lies on the borderland between the 
old culture of Europe and the new rawness of America. Ilowells 
has made much of the longings of certain classes in the older 
parts of his native land to visit the European cities, and he has 
pictured more than once their idealizations of foreign tilings, 
their retrospections and dreamings. James showed these Ameri- 
cans actually in Europe, their manners as seen against the older 
background, their crudeness and strength; and in doing so he 
produced what was widely hailed as the new international novel. 
There was nothing really new about it. James wrote of Ameri- 
cans in Europe just as Mark Twain wrote of Americans on the 
Mississippi or in California, As a scientist he must deal only 
with facts which had passed under his own observation — that was 
his much-discussed "realism" — and the life that he was most 
familiar with was the life of 'the pensions and grand hotels of 
Rome and Switzerland and Paris and London. 

His world in reality was small. He had been reared in a 
cloister-like atmosphere where he had dreamed of "life" rather 
than lived it. It is almost pathetic to think of him going up 

» Partial Portraits, 1894 ed., 207. 



192 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

to the Harvard Law School because in a va^ie way it stood for 
something which he had missed and longed to feel. ' ' I thought 
of it under the head of 'life,' " he says. He had played in his 
childhood with books rather than boys ; he had been kept away 
from his natural playmates because of their "shocking bad man- 
ners"; he had never mingled with men in a business or a profes- 
sional way ; he had never married ; he stood aloof from life and 
observed it without being a part of it. Americans he knew chiefly 
from the specimens he had found in Europe during his long resi- 
dences; European society he knew as a visitor from without. 
With nothing was he in sympathy in the full meaning of the 
word, that sympathy which includes its own self in the group 
under observation. 

For ten years he wrote studies, essays on his masters, George 
Eliot, Balzac, Daudet, and stories that were not greatly different 
from these essays — analyses of types, and social conditions, and 
of the reactions that follow when a unit of one social system is 
thrust into another. In 1875 he enlarged his area with Roderick 
Hudson, a novel of length, and he followed it with The American, 
The Europeans, Daisy Miller, and others, all of them international 
in setting. In his later period, the period, say, after 1890, he 
confined himself to the depicting of society in London, the rapid 
change toward unconventionality in manners that marked the end 
of the century. He was so far now from contact with his native 
land that of necessity he must cease to use it as his source of 
literary material. 

The earlier group of stories center about a comparatively few 
types. First, there are the young men of the Roland Mallet, 
Ralph Touchett order, "highly civilized young Americans," he 
calls them in Confidence, ' ' bom to an easy fortune and a tranquil 
destiny " ; " men who conceive of life as a fine art. ' ' His novels 
are full of them, creatures of whim who know nothing of the 
bitterness of struggle, who drift from capital to capital of Europe 
mindful only of their own comfort, highly sensitive organisms 
withal, subject to evanescent emotions which they analyze with 
minuteness, and brilliant at every point when their intellectual 
powers are called into play. They talk in witty flashes for hours 
on end and deliver finished lectures at the call of an epigram. 
They cannot talk without philosophizing or hear a maiden laugh 
without analysis. They are brilliant all the time. The conversa- 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 193 

tion of Gilbert Osmond and Mrs. Merle fills Isabel with amaze- 
ment: "They talked extremely well; it struck her almost as a 
dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance. ' ' Page after page 
they talk in a staccato, breathless profusion of wit, epigram, 
repartee, verbal jewels worthy of Alexander Pope flying at every 
opening of the lips — is even French culture as brilliant as this? 
Mr. Brand in The Europeans listening to the Baroness Miinster, 
bursts out rapturously at last, "Now I suppose that is what is 
called conversation, real conversation. It is quite the style we 
have heard about— the style of Madame de Stael, of ]\Iadame 
Recamier." 

Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized, 
occupationless men and women, James is at his best. Had he not 
been reared by Henry James, Senior ? Had he not lived his whole 
life in the charmed circle of the highly civilized ? But once out- 
side of this small area he ceases to be convincing. Of the great 
mass of the American people he knows but little. He has seen 
them only at a distance. 

As some rich woman, on a winter's mom, 
Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge 
Who with numb, blaeken'd fingers makes her fire . . . 
And wonders how she Uves, and what the thoughts 
Of that poor drudge may be, 

SO of James when he attempts to portray the great mass of his 
countrymen. One needs to examine only the case of Cliristopher 
Newman in The American. Given a man who left home at eight 
years of age to work in the mills, who at length manufactures 
wash tubs, then leather, and at last by sheer Yankee impudence 
and energy makes himself a millionaire at forty. Thrust this 
man suddenly into the circles of French nobility, place him in the 
presence of the Countess de Belgrade and ask 3'ourself if he will 
talk like this : 

She is a woman of conventions and proprieties; her world is the 
world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and 
what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a 
blooming park, a Garden of Eden ; and when she sees "This is genteel." 
or "This is improper," written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as 
if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose. 

This is not Christopher Newman ; this is no American self-made 



194 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

man talking ; it is Henry James himself. Did he realize his mis- 
take when his art was more mature and his judgment more ripe ? 
Collate the changes which he made thirty years later for the final 
edition of The American. Newman is asked, for instance, if he 
is visiting Europe for the first time. According to the earlier 
version he replies, ''Very much so"; according to the latest ver- 
sion, "Quite immensely the first." Is more proof needed? AU 
his average Americans— Daisy Miller, Henrietta Stackpole, Cas- 
per Goodwood, and the others, fall short in the same way. Ob- 
jectively they are true to life. As a painter of external portraits, 
as a depicter of tricks of personality, of manners, of all that 
makes up a perfect external likeness, James is surpassed not even 
by Howells; but he fails to reach the springs of life. Howells's 
Silas Lapham is a living personality ; James 's Christopher New- 
man is a lay figure in Yankee costume. For James knows Ameri- 
cans chiefly as he has studied them in pensions and hotels along 
the grand tour. He has not been introduced to them, he has 
simply watched them — their uneasiness in their new element, their 
attempts at adjustment, their odd little mistakes ; he hears them 
talk at the tables around him — their ejaculations, their wonder, 
their enthusiasm, and he jots it all down. He has no sympathy, 
he has no feeling, he has no object, save the scientific desire to 
record phenomena. 

This material he weaves into novels — stories, but not stories 
told with narrative intent, not stories for entertainment or won- 
der or sensation. The story is a clinic, a dissection, a psycholog- 
ical seminar. What Maisie Kneiv is an addition to the literature 
of child study. It is as if he had set himself to observe case after 
case for his brother, William James, to use as materials for psy- 
chological generalizations and a final treatise. The data are often 
inaccurate because of the observer's personal equation; it does 
not always conform with the results of our own observing — we 
wonder, for instance, if he is as far afield in his pictures of the 
European aristocracy as in those of his average Americans — ^yet 
the process is always the same. 

Rapidity of movement is foreign to his method ; he is not con- 
cerned with movement. On the portrait of one lady he will ex- 
pend two hundred thousand words. Basil in The Bostonians 
passes the evening with his Cousin Olive : the call occupies nine 
chapters; Verena TaiTant calls on Miss Chancellor: it is two 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 195 

chapters before either of them moves or speaks. It transports us 
back into the eighteenth century to the nine-volume novel. At 
every step analysis, searchings for the springs of thought and act 
— philosophizing. Lord Warburton stands before ]\Iiss Archer to 
propose marriage, but before we hear his voice we must analyze 
minutely his sensations and hers. Her first feeling was alarm. 
"This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which 
were disagreeable ; she had spent several days in analyzing them," 
etc. A review of this analysis fills a page. Then we study the 
psychology of the lover. First, he wonders why he is about to 
propose: ''He calculated that he had spent about twenty -six 
hours in her company. He had summed up all this — the per- 
versity of the impulse, the — " etc., etc. A proposal each step 
and speech of which is followed by a careful clinic to determine 
the resultant emotion, and a rigid analysis of all the elements 
that combined to produce that particular shade of emotion and 
no other, can hardly satisfy the demands of the average modern 
reader of fiction. It is the province of the novel to produce with 
verisimilitude an area of human life and to make the reader for a 
swift period at home in that area ; it is not the record of a scien- 
tific investigation. 



James has dealt almost wholly with exceptions and unusual 
cases. His "Bostonians" are not typical Bostonians at all — it is 
not too strong to declare that they are abnormalities ; his " Euro- 
peans" are almost as bad; his characters studied along the 
grand tour are rare exceptions if we compare them with the 
great average American type. Of strong, elemental men and 
women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and 
Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing. He is 
feminine rather than masculine; he is exquisite rather than 
strong. In his essay on Turgeniefif he records that the great 
Russian was never one of his admirers. "I do not think my 
stories struck him as quite meat for men. 

There is a lack, too, of seriousness: the novels really accomplish 
nothing. * ' The manner, ' ' according to Turgenieff 's opinion, ' ' is 
more apparent than the matter." Style is preferred to message. 
There is no humor, no stirring of emotions, nothing pitched above 
the key of perfect refinement— the reader does not feel and there- 



196 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

fore does not care. It is a mere intellectual exercise, a problem 
in psychology. 

That James himself was aware of this weakness we learn from 
his essay on Daudet. Of Sidonie Chebe he writes, "She is not 
felt," and again, "His weakness has been want of acquaintance 
with his subject. He has not felt what he has observed." It is 
a judgment that sweeps over the whole fiction of Henry James. 
He has never been possessed by his subject or by his characters, 
he has never been seized and hurried along by his stories, he has 
never told them because they had to be told, he has never written 
a single sentence with held breath and beating heart, and as a 
result his work can never find for long an audience save the select 
few ; an audience indeed that at length must become as restricted 
as that which now reads the exquisite creations of the elder James, 
his father. 

There is another element that must be weighed before we can 
understand fully the work of this writer, an element that is dis- 
tinctly classical. The basis underlying all of this mass of analysis 
is self -consciousness. Never was author more subjective and 
more enamoured of his own psychological processes than Henry 
James. Never does he lose sight of himself. These characters of 
his are all of them Henry James. They slip out of their costumes 
at slightest provocation to talk with his tones, to voice his philos- 
ophy, to follow his mental processes. In externals they are true 
to model though not always deeply; the hands are the hands of 
Christopher Newman, but the voice is the voice of Henry James. 

The tendency to self-consciousness has colored everything. 
Even his criticism has had its personal basis. It has consisted 
of studies in expatriation: the life of Story, that prototype of 
James ; the life of Hawthorne, that exposition of the rawness of 
America and the unfitness of the new land for the residence of 
men of culture; The American Scene — that mental analysis 
tracing every shade of emotion as he revisits what has become to 
him a foreign land. His literary essays cover largely the ex- 
periences of his apprenticeship. They trace the path of his own 
growth in art. They are strings of brilliants, flashing, often in- 
comparable, but they are not criticism in the highest sense of the 
word criticism. Few men have said such brilliant things about 
Balzac, Maupassant, Daudet, Stevenson as James, yet for all that 
a critic in the wider sense of the term really he is not. He lacks 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 197 

perspective, philosophy, system. He makes epigrams and pithy 
remarks. The ability to project himself into the standpoint of 
another, to view with sympathy of comprehension, he did not 
have. Within his limited range he could measure and the rules 
of art he could apply with brilliancy, but he could not feel. 

Self -study, the pursuit of every fleeting impression, became in 
the author at last a veritable obsession. In his later books like 
Notes of a Son and Brother, for instance, and The jhnerican 
Scene, his finger is constantly upon his own pulse. He seeks the 
source of his every fleeting emotion. He does not t€ll us why he 
did not want to enter Harvard ; he tries rather to trace the subtle 
thread of causation that could have led him not to want to want 
to go. When A Small Boy and Others appeared the world cried 
out, "Is it possible that at last Henry James has revealed him- 
self?" whereas the truth was that few men ever have revealed 
themselves more. All this endless dissection and analysis and 
scrutiny of the inner workings is in reality an analysis of Henry 
James himself. Objective he could not be. He could only stand 
in his solitude and interpret his own introspections. 

And his solitude it has been and his self-contemplation that 
have evolved his later manner. A consciously wrought-out style 
like Pater's or Maupassant's comes always as a result of soli- 
tude, of self-conscious concentration, of classicism. Eternal con- 
templation of manner can result only in mannerism more and 
more, until mannerism becomes the ruling characteristic. Clas- 
sicism perishes at last of its own refinement. 

VI 

The evolution of William Dean Howells is a problem vastly dif- 
ferent. To place Howells as a leader of those forces of refine- 
ment that followed after the New England period is seemingly to 
ignore the facts of his origin and his early training, for the little 
river town on the Ohio where he was born in 1837 was as far 
removed from New England manners and sentiments as was even 
the Hannibal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was 
reared to despise Yankees as a mean-spirited race, and he spent 
his childhood and young manhood in close contact with the rough, 
virile material that was shaping up the gi-eat West. 

Howells was of the third generation in Ohio, a Westerner of the 
Westerners. His grandfather, a Welsh manufacturer, "came to 



198 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

this country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family 
in a log cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from 
the sinister influences of the village where he was managing some 
woolen mills." ^ He finally settled down as a druggist and book- 
seller in a small village, and his son, perhaps from contact with 
his father's wares, developed a passion for literature — strange 
acquisition, it would seem, to gain in the wilderness. 

It was from this literary father rather than from his mother, 
who was from the river-faring folk of the region, that the young 
William Dean Howells was to derive his early love for books. 
He seems to have been a Henry James, Senior, with Southwestern 
training and environment and a lack of means that forbade his 
following the path of his desires. He too was a Swedenborgian 
and a mystic, and he too, despite unfavorable surroundings, kept 
in his household a literary atmosphere. Moore's Lalla Rookh, 
Thomson's Seasons, Dickens, Scott, Cowper, Bums, he read to 
his family — poetry the most of it, for "his own choice was for 
poetry, and most of our library, which was not given to theology, 
was given to poetry. ' ' An unusual character indeed in the head- 
long, practical West of the mid century ! While the mother was 
about her tasks and the children were shelling peas for dinner, 
he would sit and tell of Cervantes and the adventures of Don 
Quixote, transporting the little group into castles in Spain, and 
creating visions and longings that were to dominate the whole 
life of his little son. He watched with pleasure the literary tend- 
encies of the boy : ' ' when I began to show a liking for literature 
he was eager to guide my choice." 

The father satisfied his literary longings by editing country 
newspapers and serving as reporter at various times at the State 
capital during sessions of the legislature. He remained in no 
place long. With what Howells has called "the vagarious im- 
pulse which is so strong in our craft, ' ' he removed his family to 
new fields of labor with surprising regularity. There was little 
chance for schooling. Almost from infancy the boy was a part 
of his father's printing office. In A Boy's Town, that delightful 
autobiographic fragment told in the third person, he has given a 
glimpse of this early period : 

My boy was twelve years old by that time and was already a swift 
7 Mp Literary Passions. 4. 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 199 

compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair 
to reach the ease in setting type on Tylei-'s inaugural message. But 
what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he 
got the name of "'The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began 
to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. 
His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing 
nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or 
seventh year; and the printing office was in some sort his home, as well 
as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to 
set type than he could remember learning to read. 

The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the im- 
pression of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading 
and dreaming in a solitary comer than to ]\Iark-Twain-like ac- 
tivities with Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Though by birth and 
rearing he was a complete "Westerner of the river section, mingling 
freely with all its elements, he seems never to have taken root 
in the region or to have been much influenced by it. He has 
spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man ' ' eliminated from his 
time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like 
James, was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not 
a resident of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. 
He read enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he 
seems — also like Henry James — to have had no dream of other 
than a literary career. He saw not the headlong West that 
surged about him but the realms of poetry and romance. "To 
us who have our lives so largely in books," he wrote in later 
years, "the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the 
fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in 
the clouds, as light as any of them, . , , I was living in a time of 
high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the 
question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I 
felt deeply the shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law ; I was 
stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle be- 
tween the two great principles in our nationality was beginning 
in bloodshed ; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were 
more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound in- 
terest in literature,"^ 

It is suggestive that his earliest "passions" among the authors 
were Goldsmith, Irving, and Cervantes, and later Pope, ]\racaulay, 
and Curtis— the most of them literary artists and fiuisliers, with 

8 My Literary Passions 



200 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

grace of style and softness and dreaminess of atmosphere, rather 
than stormy creators who blazed new trails and crashed into the 
unknown with lawless power. He taught himself the use of lit- 
erary English by painstaking imitation of the classics which took 
his young fancy. His passion for Pope was long continued. 
When other boys in the schools were shirking their English gram- 
mar, Howells week after week and month after month was toiling 
at imitations of the great master of incisive English, " rubbing and 
polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take on 
an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine." 
From him ' ' I learned how to choose between words after a study 
of their fitness." Juveniles and boys' books of adventure he 
seems never to have known. From the first he was enamoured of 
the classics, and of the classics best fitted to educate him for the 
career that was to be his : " my reading from the first was such as 
to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness. " 

Never was youth more industrious in his efforts at self-mastery. 
He wasted not a moment. He discovered Macaulay and read him 
as most boys read pirate stories. ' ' Of course I reformed my prose 
style, which had been carefully modeled after that of Goldsmith 
and Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in 
short, quick sentences and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo- 
Saxon words." His health began to suffer from his application, 
but he worked steadily on. He produced quantities of poems and 
even a novel or two which he either destroyed or consigned to 
the oblivion of the newspaper upon which he worked. Later he 
enlarged the field of his literary apprenticeship by securing a 
position on a Columbus journal, or as he has himself expressed it, 
he was ' ' for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, 
and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city." ^ Then 
he began to enlarge his literary field by contributing ' ' poems and 
sketches and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York."® 

In December, 1859, he issued his first book, Poems of Two 
Friends, a small volume of rather ordinary verses written in con- 
junction with J. J. Piatt, and a few months later he published a 
campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, a book more notable for its 
effect upon its author's fortunes than for any quality it may have 
had, for it was as a result of it that he was sent in 1861 to Italy 

9 Literary Friends and Acquaintance. 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 201 

for a glorious four years of graduate study, if we may so terra it, 
in Italian literature and language and life. 

One cannot dwell too carefully upon these years of Howells's 
literary apprenticeship. As one reads his published work one 
finds from the first no immaturities. He burst upon the reading 
public as a finished writer. When his work first Ijegan to appear 
in the East, the North American Review of Boston voiced its as- 
tonishment : 

We made occasion to find out soinethins: about him, and wliat we 
learned served to increase our interest. This dehcacy, it appeared, was 
a product of the rough and ready West, this finish the natural gift of a 
yoimg man with no advantage of college training, who, passing from 
the compositor's desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been 
his own faculty of the humanities. But there are some men who are 
born cultivated.^*' 

But Howells was not bom cultivated; he achieved cultivation 
by a process of self-discipline that has few parallels in the history 
of literature. He is a classicist as James is a classicist. If his 
style is clear and concise, if he knows as few modern authors the 
resources of the English tongue, it is because he gave without re- 
serve to the mastering of it all the enthusiasm and time and 
strength of his youth and young manhood. He was not a genius : 
he w^as a man of talent of the Pope-Macaulay order that makes of 
literature not a thing of inspirations and flashes and visions, but 
a profession to be learned as one learns the pipe organ after years 
of practice, as an art demanding an exquisite skill to be gained 
only by unremitting toil. 

VII 

The Howells of the earlier period was a poet. Speaking of the 
winter of 1859-60, which saw the publication of his first volume, 
he writes : "It seemed to me as if the making and the reading 
of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was 
to it." "Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything 
else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget 
myself as to be a novelist." 

His reading more and more was in the poets. Heine he read 
with passion, and Longfellow and Tennyson, and tlien Heine, 
evermore Heine. "Nearly ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell 

10 October, 1865. 



202 AMEKICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

wrote me about something of mine that he had been reading: 
' You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mer- 
cury.' " The seven poems which Lowell accepted and printed 
in the Atlantic in 1860 and 1861 are redolent of Heine, with 
here and there traces of Longfellow. Wlien he came East just 
before his appointment to Venice it was as a poet, and a poet 
making a pilgrimage to the mother-land of poesy. 

New England was to him indeed a land of dreams and romance. 
"As the passionate pilgrim from the West," to use his own words, 
"approached his Holy Land at Boston," he felt like putting the 
shoes from otf his feet. New England was the home of Emerson 
and Longfellow and Holmes, of Whittier and Hawthorne and 
Lowell, and all the Atlantic immortals, and he appreciated it as 
Xrving and Willis had appreciated old England earlier in the 
century, or as Longfellow and Taylor had appreciated the con- 
tinent of Europe. 

Following this passionate pilgrimage with its glimpses of the 
New England Brahmins, came the transfer of the young West- 
erner to Venice, "the Chief City," as he somewhere has termed 
it, "of sentiment and fantasy." It was like stepping from the 
garish light of to-day into the pages of an old romance. The 
duties of his office were light, the salary was fifteen hundred dol- 
lars a year, and he was enabled to give, to use his own words, 
"nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure" to a study 
of Italian literature and to poetic composition. We may catch 
glimpses of what the four years meant to the eager young West- 
erner in A Foregone Conclusion and A Fearful Responsihility, 
stories that center about an American consul at A'^enice. The 
poetic quality of the period was heightened in the second year 
of his official life by his marriage — spring and Venice and a bride 
with whom to share them — no wonder that he completed a long 
poem in terza rima, "dealing," as he has expressed it, "with a 
story of our Civil War in a fashion so remote that no editor 
would print it," and that he deluged the magazines of two con- 
tinents with poems and poetic sketches. 

For the earlier Howells was a poet — until one realizes it one 
fails completely to understand him. He turned from poetry 
reluctantly, compelled by the logic of his time and by the fact 
that he had no compelling message for his age. He was of the 
contemplative, classical school, more at home in the eighteenth 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 203 

century than in the stormy nineteenth. He published in 1867 
No Love Lost, A Romance of Travel, in unrimed pentameters, 
a refined, leisurely poem classical in form and spirit. He issued 
editions of his poems in 1873 and 1886, and again as late as 
1895, but the age refused to regard him as a poet and he was 
forced into other fields. "My literary life," he observes almost 
sadly as he re\'iews his Venetian period, "almost without my 
willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of boofe 
and men in their actuality." ^^ 

From poetry Howells turned to sketches, a variety of compo- 
sition which he had cultivated since his boyhood. Irving had 
been one of his earliest passions, and following Irving had come 
Ik Marvel and Hawthorne and Curtis — gentle, contemplative 
writers with the light of poetry upon their work. Even like 
Irving and Longfellow and Taylor, he would record the strange 
new world in which he found himself. "I was bursting with the 
most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked 
at the whole ■world as material that might be turned into litera- 
ture." He lived note-book in hand. Everything was new and 
entrancing, even the talk of servants on the street or the babble 
of children at their play. It was all so new, so romantic, so re- 
moved from the world that he always had known. He would 
reproduce it in its naked truth for his countrymen; he would 
turn it all into literature for the magazines of America, and he 
would republish it at length as a new Sketch Book. 

Venetian Life belongs on the same shelf as Outre Mer and 
Views Afoot and Castilian Days — uprose sketches with the golden 
light of youth upon them. Italian Journeys is the first and best 
of a long series of sentimental "bummelings" that its author was 
to record — delicious ramblings, descriptions, characterizations — 
realistic studies, we may call them, made by a poet. Nothing 
that Howells ever wrote has been better than these earlier travel 
sketches, half poetry, half shrewd observation. In his later 
travel sketches— Tifscan Cities, London Films, Certain Delightful 
English Towns, and the like— this element grew constantly less 
and less. Wiser they undoubtedly are, and more scholarly and 
philosophic, but the freshness and poetic charm of the earlier 
Howells is not in them. The philosopher has taken the place of 
the poet. 

11 My Literary Passions, 154. 



204 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

VIII 

The first period of Howells 's literary life, the period of sketches 
and prose studies, covers the fifteen years of his connection with 
the Atlantic Monthly, first from 1866 to 1871 as assistant editor, 
and then from 1871 to 1881 as editor. He had returned from 
Venice a cosmopolitan and an accomplished Italian scholar. 
There was no trace of the West upon him; it was as if he had 
always lived in Boston. His sketches now centered about Cam- 
bridge life, just as earlier they had centered upon Italian themes 
— careful little character studies like "Mrs. Johnson" and "My 
Doorstep Acquaintance," little sentimental journeys like "A Pe- 
destrian Tour" and "A Day's Pleasure," and chatty talks about 
himself and his opinions and experiences, something after the 
manner of Dr. Holmes, a variety of composition in which he was 
to grow voluminous in later years. 

His book reviewing in the Atlantic during this period is notable 
from the fact that almost all of the chief works of the new na- 
tional period of which he was a part passed under his pen. 
Freshness and truth and originality never failed to arrest his 
attention; he was a real force in the directing of the Atlantic 
element of the American reading public toward the rising new 
school of authors, but aside from this his criticism is in no way 
significant. His art and his enthusiasm were in his sketches — • 
American sketches now with the light of Europe over them. 
Their Wedding Journey is an American counterpart to Italian 
Journeys, and it is made coherent by introducing a married pair 
on their bridal tour and describing places and manners as they 
became acquainted with them. The interest comes not at all 
from the narrative ; it comes from the setting. It is an American 
sentimental journey over which the author strives to throw the 
soft light of European romance. Rochester was like Verona; 
and Quebec — ' ' on what perverse pretext was it not some ancient 
town of Normandy ? ' ' 

Sketches, pictures of life, studies of manners, these are the 
object of the book. The author is not writing to record incidents, 
for there are few incidents to record. "That which they [the 
bridal pair] found the most difficult of management," he declares, 
"was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I 
who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 205 

supported by the fact that it is so typical in this respect. I even 
imagine the ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over 
these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual 
traveling companion of theirs." 

As a story from the standpoint of Bonner's New York Ledger, 
then in the high tide of its prosperity, it was dreary reading. 
But it was true in every line, true of background, and true to the 
facts of human life as Howells saw those facts. ' ' Ah ! poor real 
life, which I love, ' ' he exclaims, after a minute sketch of a com- 
mercial traveler and some loud-voiced girls on the train, "can I 
make others share the delight I share in thy foolish and insipid 
face?" 

But this earlier Howells gives us more than real life : he gives 
us real life touched with the glow of poetry, for the poet in How- 
ells died a lingering death. It seems as if novel-writing had come 
to him, as he declares all of his literary life had come, almost 
without his willing it. It grew gradually and naturally out of 
his sketch-writing. In his early sketch books he had studied 
places and "men in their actuality," and he would now make 
his sketches more comprehensive and bind them with a thread 
of narrative. A sketch like "A Daj^'s Outing" in Suh urban 
Sketches, and a "novel" like Their Wedding Journey differ only 
in the single element of quantity. A Chance Acquaintance, the 
record of another sentimental journey, with its careful sketches 
along the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and at Quebec, and its 
Pride-and-Prejudice-\ike study of a typical Bostonian and a 
Western girl, has more of story than the earlier book, but it is still 
a sketch book rather than a novel. Private Theatricals, his 
fourth essay at fiction, is so minute a study of a particular sum- 
mer boarding house and its patrons that it was never allowed to 
get beyond serial publication, at least one can think of no other 
reason for its suppression, and The Undiscovered Country might 
be entitled Sketches Among the Spiritualists and the Shukers. 

The Howells of this earlier period has little of story and little 
of problem. His object is to present men and manners "in their 
actuality." A Foregone Conclusion, the most idyllic of his 
novels, in reality is an added chapter to Venetian Life, written 
in the retrospect of later years. The golden light of Venice is 
over it, a Venice now more mellow and poetic because it is a part 
of the author's vanishing youth — his alma mater, as it were; 



206 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

more golden every year. The springtime is in every page of it 

The day was one of those that can come to the world only in early 
June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze 
made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. 
The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her 
tides sparkled and slept. . . . The long garland of vines that festoons 
all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows 
waved their long gi'asses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea- 
waves break in iridescent spray; the poplars marched in stately pro- 
cession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they 
vanished in the long perspective. 

One loves to linger over this early Howells, despite all his dif- 
fuseness and his lack of dramatic power. One knows that there 
is a fatal weakness in the attempted tragedy of the priest, that 
the tale does not grip and compel and haunt the soul as such a 
tale must if it be worth telling at all, that its ending is sprawling 
and conventional, and yet one cannot but feel that there is in it, 
as there is in all of the work of this earlier period of the author's 
life, youth and freshness and beauty — and poetry. These earlier 
studies are not merely cold observations upon life and society, 
analysis as of reactions in a test-tube ; these are the creations of a 
young poet, a romancer, a dreamer: the later manner was an 
artificial acquirement like the taste for olives. 

IX 

Howells 's second literary period begins with the year 1881 
when he resigned the editorship of the Atlantic Monthlij and 
settled in the country at Belmont to devote all his time to the 
writing of fiction for the Century magazine. During the decade 
that followed he produced his two strongest works, A Modern 
Instance, and The Rise of Silas LapJiam, and also A Woman's 
Reason, The Minister's Charge, Indian Summer, and others. 
He had found his life work. During the earlier period he had 
been, as it were, experimenting; he had published fifteen books, 
only five of which were novels, but it was clear now that the five 
pointed the way he was to go. 

He began now with larger canvas and with more sweep and 
freedom. No more idyllic sketches now: his business was to 
make studies at full length of American character and American 
manners. He would do for New England what Jane Austen 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 207 

had done for her narrow little corner of old England. He too 
had "the exquisite touch," to use the words of Sir Walter Scott, 
"which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters in 
teresting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." 
Like her he would bring no message and analyze no passion more 
intense than the perplexity of a maiden with two lovers ; and like 
her he would deal not with the problems of the soul of man, but 
with the manners of a small province. 

His essay on Henry James in the Century of November, 1882, 
the proclamation of the new Howells, raised a tempest of dis- 
cussion that did not subside for a decade. ' ' The stories, ' ' he de- 
clared, "were all told long ago ; and now we want to know merely 
what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. " " The art 
of fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was with 
Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential 
attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any 
more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or tlie 
coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past — they 
and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are' 
not of the present." And of the new novel — "The moving acci- 
dent is certainly not its trade ; and it prefers to avoid all manner 
of dire catastrophes." James he classified not as a story-teller, 
but as a character-painter, and he proceeded to set forth the 
thesis that "the novelist's main business is to possess his reader 
with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which 
they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally 
fails." "It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than 
what he has to tell that we care for now-a-days. ' ' 

But the Howells of the eighties was not ready yet for gi-ounds 
so advanced when it came to his own work. The romancer within 
him died hard. "I own," he admitted, "that I like a finished 
story," and he proceeded to tell finished stories with plots and 
moving accidents and culminating ends. A Woman's Reason 
is as elaborate in plot and incident as a novel by IMi^s. Braddon, 
and it has as conventional an ending. The heroine, apparently 
deserted by her lover, is forced to live in a humble boarding 
house where she is wooed persistently by a member of the Eng- 
lish nobility. She is true, however, to her old lover, who after 
having lived years on a desert island which for a time we are per- 
mitted to share with him, returns at last to rescue her, and the 



208 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

marriage crowns the book with gold. A Modern distance and 
The Rise of Silas Lapham, undoubtedly his strongest work, are 
first of all stories, and to the great majority of all who have ever 
read them they have been only stories. In other words, they have 
been read for what the author had to tell, and not necessarily for 
what he has had to say. 

He has been careful always that his tales end well, as careful 
indeed as an E. P. Roe. The ending of A Foregone Conclusion 
and of The Minister's Charge fly in the very face of realism. 
He is bold in his theories, but in the application of these theories to 
his own work he has an excess of timidity. Realism should flout 
the conventionalities ; it should have regard only for the facts in 
the case, atfect the reader as they may, but Hov>^ells had continu- 
ally on his mind the readers of the Atlantic and the nerves of 
the "Brahmins." The end of An Imperative Duty, for instance, 
gould have come only as a concession to the conventional reader. 
He allows the woman with the negro blood to marry the man 
she loves, and then hastens to say that they lived the rest of their 
lives in Italy, where such matches are not criticized and where the 
woman passed everywhere as an Italian. It would have been 
stronger art to have made her rise superior to her selfishness^ 
the soul triumphant over the flesh, and refuse to marry the man, 
and to do it for the sole compelling reason that she loved him. 

The much-discussed realism of the Howells of the eighties was 
simply a demand for truth, an insistence that all characters and 
backgrounds be drawn from nature, and that no sequence of 
events be given that might not happen in the life of the average 
man. His stories therefore, like James's, move slowly. There 
is much in them of what is technically called "lumber" — ma- 
terial that is brought in for other reasons than to advance the 
progress of the story. Every character is minutely described; 
cravats and waistcoats, hats and watch-charms, dresses and furbe- 
lows, are dwelt upon with thoroughness. The author stops the 
story to describe a carpet, a wardrobe, a peculiarity of gesture. 
A page is taken up with a description of the heroine's drawing- 
room, another is given to the view from her window. As a re- 
sult we get from the reading of the book, in spite of our impa- 
tience at its slow movement, a feeling of actuality. Bartley 
Hubbard and Marcia seem at the end like people we have known ; 
we are sure we should recognize Squire Gaylord even if we met 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 209 

him on Tremont Street. Silas Lapham, the typical self-made 
American of the era, and his wife and daughters, are speaking 
likenesses, done with sympathy; for the early years of Ilowells 
had enabled him, unlike James, to enter into bourgeois life with 
comprehension. Everywhere portraits done with a thousand 
careful touches — New England types largely drawn against a 
minute background of manners. 

It cannot fail that these novels, even like those of Jane Aus- 
ten, will be valued in years to come as historical documents. As 
a picture of the externals of the era they portray there is nothing 
to compare with them. The Boston of the seventies, gone now 
as completely as the Boston of the Revolution, lives in these 
pages. Every phase of its external life has been dwelt upon: 
its underworld and its lodging houses and its transformed coun- 
try boys in The Minister's Charge; the passing of the old Boston 
of the India trade days and the helplessness of tlie daughters 
of the patricians in A Woman's Reason; literary and journalistic 
Boston in A Modern Instance; the high and low of Boston so- 
ciety in The Rise of Silas Lapham; the entry of woman into the 
learned professions in Dr. Brecn's Practice, and so on and on — 
he has covered the field with the faithfulness of a sociological his- 
torian. He is a painter of manners, evermore manners. 

As to whether or not he touched the soul of New England as 
did Rose Terry Cooke, for instance, is another question. Ilis 
knowledge of the region was an acquirement, not a birthright. 
The surface of its society, the peculiarities of its manners and its 
point of view, the unusual traits of its natives, these he saw with 
the sharpened eyes of an outsider, but he never became so much 
a part of what he wrote that he could treat it, as Mrs. Wilkiiis- 
Freeman treated it, from the heart outward. The thing perhaps 
that impressed him first and most deeply as he came a stranger 
into the provincial little area was the so-called New England con- 
science, "grim aftercrop of Puritanism, that hypochondria of 
the soul into which the Puritanism of her father's race liad sick- 
ened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim 
upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self sacrifice." ** 
All of his New England characters have this as their humor, 
using the word in the Ben Jonsonian sense. Novels like A 

12 An Imperative Duty. 



210 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Woman's Reason and The Minister's Charge turn upon it. With 
Hawthorne the thing became a moving power, a tragic center of 
his art that could move the soul to pity or to terror, but Howells 
treats it never with the sympathy of comprehension. He never 
so treats it that we feel it; he never shows us a character pos- 
sessed by its power until it is driven over the brink of tragedy. 
It is simply one of the details that make up the portrait of a 
New Englander, as in The Lady of the Aroostook, the maiden 
cries out at the happy moment when her lover declares himself : 
" 'Oh, I knew it, I knew it,' cried Lydia. And then, as he 
caught her to him at last, ' Oh — Oh — are you sure it 's right ? ' " 
It is an element of manners, a picturesque peculiarity, a "hu- 
mor." 

X 

In his first period Howells was poetic and spontaneous, in his 
second he was deliberate and artistic, in his third he was scien- 
tific and ethical. The last period began in a general way at the 
opening of the nineties with the publication, perhaps, of A 
Hazard of New Fortunes. He had spent another year in Eu- 
rope, and in 1886 had removed to New York to do editorial work 
for the Harpers. 

Now began what undoubtedly was the most voluminous lit- 
erary career in the history of American literature. He took 
charge of the "Easy Chair" in Harper's Monthly, writing for 
it material equivalent to a volume a year, and in addition he 
poured out novels, books of travel, sketches, reviews, juveniles, 
autobiographies, comedies, farces, essays, editings, biographies — 
a mass of material equaled in bulk only by the writings of men 
like Southey or Dumas. He had learned his art with complete- 
ness. The production of clear and precise and brilliant English 
had become second nature, and he could pour it out steadily and 
with speed. 

His novels more and more now began to conform to his realis- 
tic theories. The story sank gradually from prominence, and 
gradually analysis and scientific purpose took its place. Annie 
Kilhurn, 1888, may be taken as the point of transition. The 
story could be told in a single chapter. There is no love-making, 
no culminating marriage or engagement, no passion, no crime, 
no violence greater than the flashing of eyes, no mystery, no 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 211 

climax. It is the afternoon talk of the ladies of a rural parish. 
For chapter after chapter they babble on, assisted now and then 
by the doctor or the minister or the lawyer who drops in for a cup 
of tea. As in the work of James, one may turn a dozen pages 
and find the same group still refining upon the same theme over 
the same tea-cups. The object of the author is not progress in 
events, but progress in characterization and ethical analysis. 
Through the mouths of these talkers he is discussing the problems 
of the rural church and the rural community. He attempts to 
settle nothing finally, but he sets the problem before the reader 
in all its phases, and the reader maj'^ come to his own conclusion. 

This novel is typical of all the fiction of the later Howells. 
Everywhere now problems — moral, social, psychological — prob- 
lems discussed by means of endless dialogue. A Hazard of New 
Fortunes is almost as long as Pamela, and when it is ended there 
is no logical reason for the ending save that the novelist has used 
the space allotted to him. Another volume could easily have 
been added telling of the experiences of the Dreyfooses in Eu- 
rope. The novelist may stop at any point, for he is not telling 
a story, he is painting character, and manners and developing 
a thesis. In Annie Kilhurn the effect of the sudden ending is 
disconcerting. It is like the cutting off of a yard of cloth. 

Howells had passed under the powerful influence of Tolstoy. 
"As much as one merely human being can help another," he de- 
clares, "I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced 
me in esthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again 
see life in the way I saw it before I knew him." It is ahsurd, 
however, to think that any influence could fundamentally have 
changed the art of a man like Howells in his fiftieth year. What 
Tolstoy did for him was to confirm and deepen tendencies in his 
work that already had become established and to turn his mind 
from the contemplation exclusively of manners and men in their 
actuality to problems ethical and social. He gave to him a mes- 
sage and a wider view of art. "^ATiat I feel sure is that I can 
never look at life in the mean and sordid way that I did before 
I read Tolstoy." *'He has been to me that final consciousness, 
which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on 'Life.' " 

As an example of this final Howells we may read The Landlord 
of Lion's Head, or The Traveler from Altruria, or The Qualihj 
of Mercy, which are not so much novels as minute studies of 



212 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

social or moral phases of the times, illustrated by means of a 
particular case and made clear by voluminous details. Minor 
characters serve as a chorus as the case proceeds, and the final 
effect is sermonic rather than novelistic. The poetic and the 
esthetic have yielded to the ethical and socialistic. In America 
every art ends at last in a sermon, 

XI 

The realism of Howells is of the eighteenth-century type rather 
than the nineteenth. It is classicism, as Henry James 's is classi- 
cism. His affinity is with Richardson rather than with Zola. 
He was timid and conscious of his audience. He had approached 
Boston with too much of reverence; the "tradition of the At- 
lantic" lay heavily upon him during all of his earlier period; 
the shadow of Lowell was upon his page and he wrote as in his 
presence; the suggestive words in a review of one of his earlier 
books by the North American Review, final voice of New England 
refinement, compelled him : "He has the incapacity to be com- 
mon." Thus his early writings had in them nothing of the 
Western audacity and newness. A realistic reaction from the 
romantic school of the early nineteenth century was everywhere 
— on the Continent, in England, in America — changing literary 
standards; Howells felt it and yielded to it, but he yielded only 
as Longfellow would have yielded had he been of his generation, 
or Holmes, or Lowell. He yielded to a modified realism, a timid 
and refined realism, a realism that would not offend the sensi- 
bilities of Boston, the "Boston," to quote from A Chance Ac- 
quaintance, "that would rather perish by fire and sword than 
to be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, reluctant 
Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere. ' ' He records 
scarcely a crime in all his volumes : he has not in his voluminous 
gallery a woman who ever broke a law more serious than indis- 
cretions at an afternoon tea. As a result there is no remorse, no 
problems of life in the face of broken law, no decisions that in- 
volve life and death and the agony that is sharper than death. 
In his pages life is an endless comedy where highly conventional 
and very refined people meet day after day and talk, and dream 
of Europe, and make love in the leisurely, old-fashioned way, 
and man-y happily in the end the lover of their choice. 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 213 

He is as tedious as Richardson and at times nearly as vol- 
uminous. He uses page after page of The Lady of the Aroostook 
to tell what might have been told in a single sentence. The 
grandfather and the aunt set the general situation before the 
reader, then the aunt and the clergymen, then the two passengers, 
then the passengers and the captain, then the heroine and the 
cabin boy in six pages, and finally at the very end of the book 
the heroine and the transplanted New England woman in Venice. 
Art is "nothing too much." We feel instinctively that the au- 
thor is making a mountain out of a molehill because he believes 
his readers will expect him to do it. To Bostonians he believes it 
would be inexpressibly shocking for a girl to sail for Europe the 
only woman on board the ship, though she be under the express 
care of the fatherly old sea captain and though two of the three 
other passengers are Boston gentlemen. The perturbation of 
these two model young men, their heroic nerving of themselves to 
live through the experience, their endless refinings and analyzings 
of the situation, and all of their subsequent doings are simply 
Howells's conception of "the quality of Boston." 

It is Richardsonism ; it is realism of the Pamela order; it is 
a return to the eighteenth century with its reverence for respecta- 
bility and the conventions, its dread of letting itself go and mak- 
ing scenes, its avoidance of all that would shock the nerves of 
the refined circle for which it wrote. The kinship of Howells 
with Richardson indeed is closer even than that between Howclls 
and James. They approach life from the same angle. Both 
profess to deal with men and manners in their actuality, both 
would avoid the moving accident and discard from their fictions 
all that is fantastic or improbable; both would keep closely 
within the circle of the highly respectable middle-class society 
of which they were a part ; both professed to work with no other 
than a moral purpose; and both would reveal the inner life of 
their characters only as the reader might infer it after having 
read endless descriptions and interminable conversations; and 
both wrote, as Tennyson termed Pamela and Clarissa, "great 
still books" that flow on and on with sluggish current to no par- 
ticular destination. 

Howells is less dramatic than Richardson, yet one may turn 
pages and chapters of his novels into dramatic form by supplying 
to the dialogue the names of the speakers. Howells, indeed, ac- 



214 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

quired a faculty in the construction of sparkling dialogue so bril- 
liant that he exercised it in the production of a surprising num- 
ber of so-called comedies: A Counterfeit Presentiment, The 
Mouse-Trap, The Elevator, and the like, dramatic in form but 
essentially novelistic in all things else. His genius was not dra- 
matic. He evolves his characters and situations slowly. The 
swift rush and culminating plot of the drama are beyond him. 
His comedies are chapters of dialogue from unwritten novels — 
studies in character and manners by means of conversations. 

Richardson 's novels centered about women ; they were written 
for women ; they were praised first of all for their minute knowl- 
edge of the feminine heart. There was indeed in his own nature 
a feminine element that made him the absolute opposite of a 
masculine type, for instance like Fielding. Howells also centered 
his work about women. In one of the earliest reviews of his work 
is the sentence "his knowledge of women is simply marvelous." 
Like his earlier prototype, he has expended upon them a world 
of analysis and dissection and description. With what result? 
To one who has read all of his fictions straight through there 
emerges at last from the helpless, fluttering, hesitating, rapturous 
and dejected, paradoxical, April-hoping, charming throng of his 
heroines — Mrs. March, Kitty Ellison, Lydia, Marcia, Mrs. Camp- 
bell, ]\Irs. Roberts, Helen Harkness, Florida, Mrs. Lapham and 
her daughters, Dr. Breen, Clara Kingsbury, Rhoda Aldgate, An- 
nie Kilburn, Mrs. Dreyfoos and the hundred others — there 
emerges a single woman, the Howells type, as distinct a creature 
as the Richardson type, and as one compares the two he is startled 
to find them almost identical. The Richardson feminine is a 
trembling, innocent, helpless creature pursued by men ; the How- 
ells type is the same woman transported into the nineteenth cen- 
tury, inconsequent, temperamental, often bird-like and charming, 
electric at repartee, pursued by men and fleeing flutteringly from 
them, yet dependent upon them for her very existence. In all 
of these fictions there is scarcely a feminine figure, at least in a 
leading role, of whom her sex may be proud. His masculine 
characters are many of them strong and admirable, even to the 
minor figures like Mr. Harkness and Captain Butler and Squire 
Gaylord. He has, perhaps, created two characters — Silas Lap- 
ham and Bartly Hubbard — to place beside Natty Bumppo, and 
Uncle Remus, and Yuba Bill, Sam Lawson, Colonel Sellers, and 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 215 

a few others, as permanent additions to the gallery of American 
types. But with all his studies of women he has added nothing 
original, no type that can be accepted as characteristic or ad- 
mirable. 

XII 

The art of Howells is essentially of this present world. Of 
the soul of man and the higher life of his dreanis and aspirations 
he has nothing to tell. He writes of Hawthorne: "In all his 
books there is the line of thoughts that we think of only in the 
presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault 
that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow in sore doubt 
rather than shapes the lips to utterance of tlie things that can 
never be said." Howells would ignore such themes. He is of 
the age of doubt, the classical age, rather than of the age of faith 
that sees and creates. Lightly he skims over the surface of ma- 
terial things, noting the set of a garment or the shade of a cravat, 
recording rather than creating, interested in life only as it is 
affected by manners, sketching with rapid pen characters evolved 
by a provincial environment, tracing with leisurely thoroughness 
the love story of a boy and girl, recording the April changes of a 
maiden's heart, the gossip of an afternoon tea — a feminine task 
one would suppose, work for a Fanny Burney, a Maria Edge- 
worth or a Mrs. Gaskell, no work indeed for a great novelist at the 
dawn of a new period in a new land. While the West, of which 
his earlier life was a part, was crashing out a new civilization ; 
while the air was electric with the rush and stir of rising cities ; 
while a new star of hope for the nations was rising in the West ; 
while a mighty war of freedom was waging about him and the 
soul of man was being tried as by fire, Howells, like Clarissa Har- 
lowe, is interested "in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, 
her aunts and uncles." 

And yet even as we class him as a painter of manners we 
remember that America has no manners in the narrower sense of 
the term. New England had the nearest approach to manners, 
yet New England, all must admit, was wholly imitative ; she was 
enamoured of Europe. Howells has anotlier side to his classicism, 
one utterly wanting in Richardson — he is a satirist of manners, a 
critic and a reformer. Richardson took English manners as he 
took the English Constitution and the English language as a 



216 AMEEICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

matter of course. He never dreamed of changing the order oi 
things ; he would only portray it and teach individuals how best 
to deport themselves under its laws. Howells, after his first awe 
of New England had subsided, became critical. He would 
change manners ; he would portray them that men by seeing them 
would learn their ridiculousness — in short, he became, what every 
classicist must sooner or later become, a satirist — a chafer under 
the conventions that bind him, — a critic. 

Howells then is the rare figure of a lyric poet and a romanticist 
who deliberately forced himself into classicism as a result of his 
environment. His earlier works are the record of a transition — 
enthusiasm, poetic glow, romance, tempered more and more with 
scientific exactness and coldness and skill. Like James, he learned 
his profession with infinite toil; like James, he formed himself 
upon masters and then defended his final position with a sum- 
mary of the laws of his art. Like James, he schooled himself to 
distrust the emotions and work wholly from the intellect. The 
result in the case of both, in the case of all classicists in fact, has 
been that the reader is touched only in the intellect. One smiles 
at the flashes of wit ; one seldom laughs. No one ever shed a tear 
over a page either of Howells or James. One admires their skill ; 
one takes a certain pleasure in the lifelikeness of the characters 
— especially those of Howells — but cold lifelikeness is not the su- 
preme object of art; manners and outward behavior are but a 
small part of life. Unless the novelist can lay hold of his reader 's 
heart and walk with him with sympathy and conviction he must 
be content to be ranked at last as a mere showman and not a 
voice, not a leader, not a prophet. 

XIII 
Howells, like James, was peculiarly a product of the later nine- 
teenth century and of the wave of democracy in literature that 
came both to Europe and America as a reflex from the romanti- 
cism of Scott and Coleridge and the German Sturm und Drang. 
Had he lived a generation earlier he would have been a poet of 
the Dr. Holmes type, an Irving, or a George William Curtis. 
The spirit of the times and a combination of circumstances made 
of him the leader of the depicters of democracy in America. 
From the vantage point of the three leading magazines of the 
period he was enabled to command a wide audience and to exert 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 217 

enormous influence. His beautiful style disarmed criticism and 
concealed the leanness of his output. Had he been less timid, 
had he dared like Mark Twain or Whitman to forget the fastidi- 
ous circle within which he lived, and write with truth and hon- 
esty and sincerity the great nation-wide story with its passion, 
its tragedy, its comedy, its tremendous significance in the history 
of humanity, he might have led American fiction into fields far 
broader than those into which it finally settled. 

In the process of the new literary discovery of America How- 
ells 's part was to discover the prosaic ordinary man of the middle 
class and to make him tolerable in fiction. He was the leading 
force in the reaction against the Sylvanus Cobb type of romance 
that was so powerful in America in the early seventies. He made 
the new realism respectable. All at once America found that she 
was full of material for fiction. Hawthorne had taught that the 
new world was barren of material for the novelist. Cooper had 
limited American fiction to the period of the settlement and the 
Revolution; Longfellow and Taylor had turned to romantic Eu- 
rope. After Howells's minute studies of the New England mid- 
dle class, every provincial environment in America produced its 
recorder, and the novel of locality for a time dominated American 
literature. 

In another and more decided way, perhaps, Howells was 
a potent leader during the period. He has stood for finished 
art, for perfection of style, for literary finish, for perfect Eng- 
lish in an age of slovenliness and slang. No writer of the period 
has excelled him in accuracy of diction, in brilliancy of expres- 
sion, in unfailing purity of style. There is an eighteenth-cen- 
tury fastidiousness about every page that he has written. 

The tribute of ]\Iark Twain is none too strong: "For forty 
years his English has been to me a continual delight and aston- 
ishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities — 
clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seem- 
ingly unconscious felicity of phrasing — he is, in my belief, without 
peer in the English-speaking world. Sustained. I entrench my- 
self behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit 
those qualities as greatly as does he, but only by inton-aled dis- 
tributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer 
landscape between, whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies 
all night and all the nights. ' ' 



218 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Henry James. (1843-1916.) Watch and Ward [in the Atlantic], 1871; 
A Passionate Pilgrim, Roderick Hudson, Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; The 
American, 1877; French Poets and Novelists, The Europeans, Daisy Miller, 
1878; An International Episode, Life of Haiothorne, A Bundle of Letters, 
The Madonna of the Future, Confidence, 1879; Diary of a Man of Fifty, 
Washington Square, 1880; The Portrait of a Lady, 1881; The Siege of 
London, 1883; Portraits of Places, Tales of Three Cities, A Little Tour 
in France, 1884; The Author of Beltraffio, 1885; The Bostonians, Princess 
Casamassima, 1886; Partial Portraits, The Aspern Papers, The Reverbera- 
tor, 1888; A London Life, 1889; The Tragic Muse, 1890; The Lesson of the 
Master, 1892; Terminations, 1896; The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie 
Knew, 1897; In the Cage, 1898; The Awkward Age, 1899; The Soft Side, 
The Sacred Font, 1901; The Wings of the Dove, 1902; The Better Sort, 
William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903; The Question of Our 
Speech, The Lesson of Balzac [Lectures], 1905; The American Scene, 
1906; Italian Hours, Julia Bride, Novels and Tales, 24 volumes, 1909; 
Finer Grain, 1910; The Outcry, 1911; A Small Boy and Others, 1912; 
Notes of a Son and Brother, 1913; Notes on Novelists, with Some Other 
Notes, 1914. 

William Dean Howells. (1837 .) Poems of Two Friends, 1859; 

Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin [Hamlin 
by J. L. Hayes], 1860; Venetian Life, 1866; Italian Journeys, 1867; No 
Love Lost: a Romance of Travel, 1868; Suburban Sketches, 1871; Their 
Wedding Journey, 1872; A Chance Acquaintance, Poems, 1873; A Fore- 
gone Conclusion, 1874; Amateur Theatricals [in the Atlantic], 1875; The 
Parlor Car: Farce, 1876; Out of the Question: a Comedy, A Counterfeit 
Presentiment, 1877; The Lady of the Aroostook, 1879; The Undiscovered 
Country, 1880; A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories, Dr. Breen's 
Practice: a Novel, 1881; A Modern Instance: a Novel, 1882; The Sleeping- 
Car: a Farce, A Woman's Reason: a Novel, 1883; The Register: Farce, 
Three Villages, 1884; The Elevator: Farce, The Rise of Silas Lapham, 
Tuscan Cities, 1885; The Garroters: Farce, Indian Summer, The Minister's 
Charge, 1886; Modern Italian Poets: Essays and Versions, April Hopes, 
1887; A Sea-Change; or. Love's Stowaway : a Lyricated Farce, Annie Kil- 
burn: a Novel, 1888; The Mouse-Trap, and Other Farces, A Hazard of 
Neio Fortunes: a Novel, 1889; The Shadoio of a Dream: a Story, A Boy's 
Town, 1890; Criticism and Fiction, The Albany Depot, An Imperative 
Duty, 1891; The Quality of Mercy: a Novel, A Letter of Introduction: 
Farce, A Little Swdss Sojourn, Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories 
Told for Children, 1892; The World of Chance: a Novel, The Unexpected 
Guests: a Farce, My Year in a Log Cabin, Evening Dress: Farce, The 
Coast of Bohemia: a Novel, 1893; A Traveler from Altruria: Romance, 
1894; My Literary Passions, Stops of Various Quills, 1895; The Day of 
Their Wedding: a Novel, A Parting and a Meeting, Impressions and Ex- 
periences, 1896; A Previous Engagement : Comedy, The Landlord at Lion's 
Head: a Novel, An Open-Eyed Conspiracy: an Idyl of Saratoga, 1897; 
The Story of a Play: a Novel, 1898; Ragged Lady: a Novel, Their Silver 



THE CLASSICAL REACTION 219 

Wedding Journey, 1899; Room Forty-five: a Farce, The Smoking Car: a 
Farce, An Indian Giver: a Comedy, Literary Friends and Acquaintance: 
a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship, 1900; A Pair of Patient 
Lovers, Heroines of Fiction, 1901; The Kentons, The Flight of Pony 
Baker: a Boy's Town Story, Literature and Life: Studies, 1902; Question- 
able Shapes, Letters Home, 1903; The Son of Royal Langbrith: a Xovel, 
1904; Miss Bellard's Inspiration: a Novel, London Films, 1905; Certain 
Delightful English Towns, 1906; Through the Eye of a Needle: a Romance, 
Mulberries in Pay's Garden, Between the Dark and the Daylight, 1907; 
Fennel and Rue: a Novel, Roman Holidays, and Others, 1908; The Mother 
and the Father: Dramatic Passages, Seven English Cities, 1909; My 
Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, Imaginary Interviews, 1910; 
Parting Friends: a Farce, 1911; Familiar Spanish Travels, New Leaf Mills, 
1913; The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon, 1914. 



CHAPTER XI 

RECORDERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 

The New England school, which had so dominated the mid- 
nineteenth century, left, as we have seen, no heirs. As the great 
figures of the "Brahmins" disappeared one by one, vigorous 
young leaders from without the Boston circle came into their 
places, but the real succession — the native New England literary 
generation after Emerson — was feminine. During the decade 
from 1868 the following books, written by women born, the most 
of them, in those thirties which had witnessed the beginnings of 
the earlier group, came from the American press : 

1868. Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott (1832-1888). 

1868. The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911). 

1870. Verses, Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885). 

1872. Poems, Celia Thaxter (1836-1894). 

1873. The Saxe Holm Stories, "Saxe Holm." 

1875. One Summer, Blanche Willis Howard (1847-1898). 

1875. After the Ball and Other Poems, Nora Perry (1841-1896). 

1877. Deephaven, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). 

1878. The China Hunter's Cluh, Annie Trumbull Slosson (1S38 ). 

Of the same generation, but earlier or else later in the literary 
field, were the poets Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911), and 
Louise Chandler Moulton (1835-1908) ; the essayist Mary Abigail 
Dodge, "Gail Hamilton" (1838-1896) ; the novelists Rose Terry 
Cooke (1827-1892), Jane G. Austin (1831-1894), and Harriet 

Prescott Spofford (1835 ) ; and, latest of all to be known, the 

intense lyrist Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). In the eighties was 
to come the school of the younger realists, a part of the classical 

reaction — Alice Brown (1857 ), Kate Douglas Wiggin 

(1859 ) and Mary E. Wilkins (1862 ), who were to 

record the later phases of the New England decline. 

Outside of the New England environment there was also a 
notable outburst of feminine literature. In the thirteen years 
from 1875 appeared the following significant first volumes : 

220 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 221 

1875. Castle Noxuhere, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1848-1894). 
1875. A Woman in Armor, Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1847-1902). 
1877. That Lass o' Lowrie's, Frances Hodg-son Burnett (1849 ). 

1883. The Led Horse Claim, Mary Hallock Foote (1847 ). 

1884. In the Tennessee Mountains, Maiy Noailles Murfree 
(1850 ). 

1884. A New Yea7-'s Masque, Edith M. Thomas (1854 ). 

1886. The Old Garden and Other Verses, Margaretta Wade Deland 
(1857 ). 

1886. Monsieur Motte, Grace King (1852 ). 

1887. Knitters in the Sun, Ahce French (1850 ). 

The wide recognition of the Victorian women, Charlotte 
Bronte, George Eliot, and Mrs. Browning, and their American 
contemporaries, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, had given the 
impetus, and the enormous popularity of prose fiction, a literary- 
form peculiarly adapted to feminine treatment, the opportunity. 
During all the period the work of women dominated to a large 
degree the literary output. 

I 

The earliest group to appear was made up of daughters of the 
Brahmins — Louisa M. Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose 
Hawthorne Lathrop, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others — transition 
figures who clung to the old New England tradition, yet were 
touched by the new forces. The representative figure is Elizabeth 
Stuart Phelps. Daughter and granddaughter of theologians and 
divinity professors, reared in the atmosphere of the Audover 
theological seminary of the earlier period, she was a daughter 
of her generation, a perfect sample of the culminating feminine 
product of two centuries of New England Puritanism — sensitive 
to the brink of physical collapse, intellectual, disquieted of soul, 
ridden of conscience, introspective. We know the type perfectly. 
]\Iiss Jewett, Mrs. Freeman, IMiss Brown, have drawn us scores 
of these women — the final legatees of Puritanism, daughters of 
Transcendentalists and abolitionists and religious wranglers. 

Literature to this group of women was not only a heritage 
from the past, from great shadowy masters who were mere names 
and books, it was a home product in actual process of manufac- 
ture about their cradles. The mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 
— Elizabeth Stuart — had published in 1851 Sunnji-Sidc, a simple 
story of life in a country parsonage, that had sold one hundred 
thousand copies in one year. She had followed it with A Peep 



222 AMEKICAN LITEKATURE SINCE 1870 

at Number Five, a book that places her with Mrs. Stowe as a 
pioneer depicter of New England life, and then, at the very 
opening of her career, she had died in 1852. ''It was impossible 
to be her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, im- 
possible to be their daughter and not to have something to say, 
and a pen to say it. " ^ The daughter was publishing at thir- 
teen; at nineteen she was the author of twelve Sunday-school 
books ; ^ at twenty-four she had issued The Gates Ajar, which was 
to go through twenty editions the first year and to be translated 
into the principal European languages. 

Gates Ajar is a significant book, significant beyond its real 
literary merit. It is a small book, an excited, over-intense book, 
yet as a document in the history of a period and a confession 
laying bare for an instant a woman's soul it commands atten- 
tion. It is not a novel; it is a journal intime, an impassioned 
theological argument, a personal experience written with tears 
and read with tears by hundreds of thousands. It was the writer 
herself who had received the telegram telling that a loved one — 
not a brother as the book infers — had been shot in battle ; it was 
her own life that had almost flickered out as the result of it; 
and it was she who had tried to square the teachings ingrained 
into her Puritan intellect with the desolation of her woman's 
heart. 

It was peculiarly a New England book : only a New Englander 
of the old tradition can understand the full meaning of it, and 
yet it came at a moment when the whole nation was eager and 
ready for its message. The war had brought to tens of thousands 
what it had brought to this New England woman. In e very- 
house there was mourning, and the Puritan vision of the after 
life, unreasonable and lifeless, was inadequate for a nation that 
had been nourished upon sentimentalism. The heart of the 
people demanded something warm and sensible and convincing 
in place of the cold scriptural metaphors and abstractions. The 
new spirit that had been awakened by the war called for reality 
and concrete statement everywhere, and it found in the book, 
which made of heaven another earth— a glorified New England 
perhaps— with occupation and joys and friendships unchanged, a 
revelation with which it was in full accord. It brought comfort, 
for in every line of it was the intensity of conviction, of actual 

1 Chapters from a Life, 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 223 

experience. It quivered with sympathy, it breathed reality from 
every page, and it seemed to break down the barriers until the 
two worlds were so near together that one might hold his breath 
to listen. The book, while it undoubtedly helped to prolong the 
sentimental era in America, nevertheless must be counted among 
the forces that brought to the new national period its fuller meas- 
ure of toleration, its demand for reality, its wider sympathy. 

All the author's later books bear the same marks of intensity, 
of subjectivity, of purpose: all of them are outpourings of her- 
self. She is a special pleader shrilling against abuses, as in 
Loveliness, which excoriates vivisection, arguing for causes as in 
The Story of Avis and Doctor Zay, which take high ground con- 
cerning women, or preaching sermons as in A Singular Life, 
a vision of the ideal pastor and his church. The accumulated 
Puritanism within her gave to all her work dramatic tension. 
It is impossible to read her with calmness: one is shocked and 
grieved and harrowed; one is urged on every page to think, to 
feel, to rush forth and right some wrong, to condemn some evil 
or champion some cause. 

Her world was largely a subjective one; to write she must 
be touched strongly on the side of her sympathy, she must have 
brought vividly into her vision some concrete case. Before she 
could write "The Tenth of January" — Atlantic, 1868 — she must 
spend a month in the atmosphere of the tragedy, not to collect 
realistic details, but to feel for herself the horror that she would 
impart. Her aim was sentimental : the whole story centers about 
the fact that while the ruins of the fallen mill were burning there 
floated out of the flames the voices of imprisoned girls singing 
"Shall We Gather at the River?" In its fundamentals her 
work, all of it, is autobiographic. Womanlike, she denied the 
fact — "If there be one thing among the possibilities to which a 
truly civilized career is liable, more than another objectionable to 
the writer of these words, the creation of autobiography has long 
been that one," ^ and yet her books, all of them, have been chap- 
ters out of her own spiritual life. She has felt rather than seen, 
she has pleaded rather than created. Rather than present a 
rounded picture of the life objectively about her, she has given 
analyses of her own New England soul. 

2 Chapters from a Life. 



224 AMERICAN LITEEATURE SINCE 1870 

She yielded, at last, in some degree, to the later tendencies of 
American literature, and drew with realistic faithfulness charac- 
ters and characteristics in the little New England world that 
was hers— A Madonna of the Tubs, The Supply at St. Agatha's, 
Jack, the Fisherman, and a few others, yet even these are some- 
thing more than stories, something more than pictures and in- 
terpretations. In Jack, the Fisherman, for instance, the temper- 
ance lesson stands out as sharply as if she had taken a text. 
The artist within her was dominated ever by the preacher; the 
novelist by the Puritan. 

II 

Another transition figure, typical of a group of writers and 
at the same time illustrative of the change that came over the 
tone of American literature after the war period, is Harriet Pres- 
cott Spofford. A country girl, born in a Maine village, educated 
in the academy of a country town in New Hampshire, compelled 
early to be the chief support of an invalided father and mother, 
she turned from the usual employments open to the women of her 
time — work in the cotton mills and school teaching — to the pre- 
carious field of literature. That could mean only storj^-writing 
for the family weeklies of the day, for a bourgeois public that 
demanded sentimental love stories and romance. Success made 
her ambitious. She applied herself to the study of fiction — 
American, English, French. How wide was her reading one may 
learn from her essays later published in the Atlantic, ' ' The Au- 
thor of 'Charles Auchester' " and "Charles Reade." The new 
realism which was beginning to be felt as a force in fiction, she 
flouted with indignation: — "he never with Chinese accuracy, 
gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the 
commonplace." Rather would she emulate the popular novelist 
Elizabeth Sheppard: "At his, Disraeli's, torch she lit her fires, 
over his stories she dreamed, his ' Contarini Fleming ' she declared 
to be the touchstone of all romantic truth." ^^ The essay re- 
veals the author like a flash-light. She too dreamed over Disraeli 
and the early Bulwer-Lytton, over Charlotte Bronte and Poe, 
over George Sand and French romance until at last when she 
submitted her first story to the Atlantic, "In a Cellar," Lowell 
for a time feared that it was a translation. 

s Atlantic, June, 1862. 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 225 

Other American women have had imaginations as lawless and 
as gorgeously rich as Harriet Preseott Spofford's; Augusta J. 
Evans Wilson, for instance, whose St. Elmo (1866) sold enor- 
mously even to the end of the new period, but no other American 
woman of the century was able to combine with her imaginings 
and her riotous colorings a real distinction of style. When in 
the fifth volume of the Atlantic appeared "The Amber Gods," 
judicious readers everywhere cried out in astonishment. Robert 
Browning and others in England praised it extravagantly. A 
new star had arisen, a novelist with a stj^e that was French in 
its brilliancy and condensation, and oriental in its richness and 
color. 

The Amber Gods fails of being a masterpiece by a margin so 
small that it exasperates, and it fails at precisely the point where 
most of the mid-century fiction failed. In atmosphere and style 
it is brilliant, so brilliant indeed that it has been appraised more 
highly than it deserves. Moreover, the motif, as one gathers 
it from the earlier pages, is worthy of a Hawthorne. The amber 
beads have upon them an ancestral curse, and the heroine with 
her supernatural beauty, a satanic thing without a soul, is a part 
of the mystery and the curse. Love seems at length to promise 
Undine-like a soul to this soulless creature : 

He read it through — all that perfect, perfect scene. From the mo- 
ment when he said, 

"I overlean, 
This length of hair and lustrous front — tlicy turn 
Like an entire flower upward" — 

his voice low, sustained, clear — till he reached the line, 
"Look at the woman here with the new soul" — 

till he turned the leaf and murmured, 

"Shall to produce form out of unshapcd stulT 

Be art — and, further, to evoke a soul 

From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!" — 

till then he never glanced up. 

But there is lack of constructive skill, lack of definiteness, 
lack of reality. The story sprawls at the end where it should 
culminate with compelling power. The last sentence is startling, 
but it is not connected with the motif and is a mere sensational 
addition. Everywhere there is the unusual, the overwrought, 
incoherent vagueness. It is not experience, it is a revel of color 



226 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and of sensuousness ; it is a Keats-like banquet, sweets and 
spicery. 

The parallelism with Keats may be pressed far. She was first 
of all a poet, a lyrist, a dweller in Arcady rather than in a New 
England village. She, like so many others of her generation, 
had fallen under the spell of the young Tennyson, and her world 
is a world of cloying sweetness, of oriental sensuousness, of 
merely physical beauty. Poems like "Pomegranate-Flowers" 
and "In Titian's Garden" show her tropical temperament: 

And some girl sea-bronzed and sparkling, 

On her cheek the stain ensanguined, 

Bears aloft the bossy salver: 

As the mnocent Lavinia 

Brought them in old days of revel 

Fruits and flowers amesh with sunbeams — 

No red burnish of pomegranates. 

No cleft peach in velvet vermeil, 

No bright grapes their blue bloom bursting, 

Dews between the cool globes slipping, 

Dews like drops of clouded sapphire, 

But the brighter self and spirit. 

Glowed illusive in her beauty. 

The same poetic glamour she threw over all the work that now 
poured m swift profusion from her pen: Sir Rohan's Ghost, 
Azarian, and a score of short stories in the Atlantic and Harper's 
and other periodicals. It had been felt that the faults so mani- 
fest in "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" would disappear 
as the young author gained in maturity and knowledge of her 
art, but they not only persisted, they increased. Like Charlotte 
Bronte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she knew life only 
as she dreamed of it in her country seclusion or read of it in ro- 
mance. At length toleration ceased. In 1865 The North Ameri- 
can Review condemned Azarian as "devoid of human nature and 
false to actual society," and then added the significant words: 
"We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be real, to be true 
to something." It marks not alone the end of the first period 
in Miss Prescott 's career; it marks the closing of an era in Ameri- 
can fiction. 

Wonder has often been expressed that one who could write 
''The Amber Gods" and Sir Rohan's Ghost should suddenly lapse 
into silence and refuse to work the rich vein she had opened. 



EECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 227 

The change, however, was not with the author; it was with the 
times. Within a year Howells was assistant editor of the At- 
lantic. The artificiality of style and the high literary tone de- 
manded in the earlier period disappeared with the war, and in 
their place came simplicity and naturalness and reality. The 
author of Azarian continued to write her passionate and melodi- 
ous romance, but the columns of the Atlantic and Harper's at 
length were closed to her tales. A volume of her work of this 
period still awaits a publisher. 

She now turned to poetry — there was no ban upon that; the 
old regime died first in its prose — and poured out lyrics that are 
to be compared even with those of Taylor and Aldrieh, lyrics full 
of passion and color and sensuous beauty. Among the female 
poets of America she must be accorded a place near the highest. 
Only "H. H." could have poured out a lyric like this: 

In the dew and the dark and the coolness 

I bend to the beaker and sip, 
For the earth is the Lord's, and its fullness 

Is held like the cup to my lip. 

For his are the vast opulences 

Of color, of Ime, and of flight. 
And his was the joy of the senses 

Before I was born to delight. 

Forever the loveliness lingers, 

Or in flesh, or in spirit, or dream, 
For it swept from the touch of his fingers 

While his garments trailed by in the gleam. 

When the dusk and the dawn in slow union 

Bring beauty to bead at the brim, 
I take, 't is the cup of coranumion, 

I drink, and I drink it with Him! 

A chapter of analysis could not so completely reveal the soul of 
Harriet Prescott Spofford. 

For a time she busied herself making books on art decoration 
applied to furniture, and then at last she yielded to the forces 
of the age and wrote stories that again commanded the maga- 
zines. With work like "A Rural Telephone," "An Old Fid- 
dler," and "A Village Dressmaker," she entered with real dis- 
tinction the field that had been preempted by Miss Cooke and 



228 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Miss Jewett, the depiction of New England life in its actuality. 
Then at the close of her literary life she wrote deeper tales, like 
"Ordronnaux," a stoiy with the same underlying motif as 
"The Amber Gods" — the creation of a soul in soulless beauty — 
but worked out now with reality, and experience, and compelling 
power. But it was too late. Could she have learned her lesson 
when Rose Terry Cooke learned hers ; could she, instead of wast- 
ing her powers upon the gorgeous Azarian, have sent forth in 
1863 her volume Old Madame and Other Tragedies, she might 
have taken a leading place among American novelists. 

Ill 
The school of fiction that during the later period stands for 
the depicting of New England life and character in their actu- 
ality had as its pioneers Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke. Both 
did their earlier work in the spirit and manner of the mid cen- 
tury; both were poets and dreamers; both until late in their 
lives worked with feeling rather than observation and gave to 
their fiction vagueness of outline and romantic unreality. Uncle 
Tom's Cabin was written by one who had never visited the South, 
who drew her materials largely from her feelings and her im- 
agination, and made instead of a transcript of actual life, a book 
of religious emotion, a swift, unnatural succession of picturesque 
scene and incident, an improvisation of lyrical passion — a melo- 
drama. It is the typical novel of the period before 1870, the 
period that bought enormous editions of The Lamplighter, The 
Wide, Wide World, and St. Elmo. The Minister's Wooing, 1859, 
a historical romance written in the Andover that a little later 
was to produce Gates Ajar, was also fundamentally religious and 
controversial: it contained the keynote of what was afterwards 
known as the Andover movement. It dealt with a people and 
an environment that the author knew as she knew her own child- 
hood, and it had therefore, as Uncle Tom's Cabin has not, sym- 
pathy of comprehension and truth to local scene and character. 
And yet despite her knowledge and her sympathy, the shadow of 
the mid century lies over it from end to end. It lacked what 
Elsie Venner lacked, what the great bulk of the pre-Civil War 
literature lacked, organization, sharpness of line, reality. Lowell, 
a generation ahead of his time, saw the weakness as well as the 
strength of the book, and in pointing it out he criticized not alone 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 229 

the author but her period as well. "My advice," he wrote her 
with fine courage, "is to follow your own instincts — to stick to 
nature, and avoid what people commonly call the 'Ideal'; for 
that, and beauty, and pathos, and success, all lie in the simply 
natural. . . . There are ten thousand people who can write 
'ideal' things for one who can see, and feel, and reproduce na- 
ture and character. ' ' * Again the voice of the new period in 
American literature. But Mrs. Stowe was not one to heed lit- 
erary advice ; her work must come by inspiration, by impulse 
connected with purpose, and it must work itself out without 
thought of laws or models. The Pearl of Orr's Island came by 
impulse, as later, in 1869, came Oldtown Folks. "It was more 
to me than a story," she wrote of it; "it is my resume of the 
whole spirit and body of New England, a country that is now 
exerting such an influence on the civilized world that to know it 
truly becomes an object."^ That these books, and the Oldtown 
Fireside Stories that followed, do furnish such a resume is by no 
means true, but that they are faithful transcripts of New Eng- 
land life, and are pioneer books in a field that later was to be 
intensively cultivated, cannot be doubted. 

Mrs. Stowe 's influence upon later writers was greater than is 
warranted by her actual accomplishment. The fierce light that 
beat upon Uncle Tom's Cabin gave to all of her work extraor- 
dinary publicity and made of her a model when otherwise she 
would have been unknown. The real pioneer was Rose Terry 
Cooke, daughter of a humble family in a small Connecticut vil- 
lage. Educated in a seminary near her home, at sixteen she was 
teaching school and at eighteen she was writing for Graham's 
Magazine a novel called The Mormon's Wife. That she had 
never been in Utah and had never even seen a Mormon, mattered 
not at all ; the tale to win its audience need be true only to its 
author's riotous fancy. But the author had humor as well as 
fancy, and her sense of humor was to save her. In her school 
work in rural districts she was in contact constantly with the 
quaint and the ludicrous, with all those strongly individuali/.ed 
characters that Puritanism and isolated country living had ren- 
dered abundant. They were a part of her every-day life ; they 
appealed not only to her sense of humor, but to her sympathy. 

4 Stowe's Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 334. 
8 Fielda's Authors and Friends, 200. 



230 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

She found herself thinking of them as she sought for subjects for 
her fiction. Her passion and her ambition were centered upon 
poetry. The idealism and the loftiness that Harriet Prescott 
Spofford threw into her early romance, she threw into her lyrics. 
Fiction was a thing of less seriousness ; it could be trifled with ; 
it could even record the humor and the quaintness of the common 
folk amid whom she toiled. She turned to it as to a diversion 
and she was surprised to find that Lowell, the editor of the new 
and exclusive Atlantic, preferred it to her poetry. For the first 
volume of the magazine he accepted no fewer than five of her 
homely little sketches, and praised them'f or their fidelity and truth. 
That the author considered this prose work an innovation and 
something below the high tone of real literature, cannot be 
doubted. In "Miss Lucinda" {Atlantic, 1861), as perfect a 
story of its kind as was ever written, she feels called upon to 
explain, and her explanation is a declaration of independence : 

But if I apologize for a story that is nowise tragic, nor fitted to "the 
fashion of these times," possibly somebody will say at its end that I 
should also have apologized for its subject, since it is as easy for an 
author to treat his readers to high themes as vulgar ones, and velvet 
can be thrown into a portrait as cheaply as calico ; but of this apology 
I wash mj-- hands. I believe nothing in place or circumstance makes 
romance. I have the same quick sympathy for Biddy's sorrows with 
Patrick that I have for the Empress of France and her august, but 
rather grim, lord and master. I think words are often no harder to 
bear than "a blue batting," and I have a reverence for poor old maids 
as great as for the nine Muses. Commonplace people are only common- 
place from character, and no position affects that. So forgive me 
once more, patient reader, if I offer you no tragedy in high life, no 
sentimental history of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about 
a woman who could not be a heroine. 

This is the key to her later work. She wrote simple little 
stories of commonplace people in a commonplace environment, 
and she treated them with the sympathy of one who shares, rather 
than as one who looks down upon a spectacle and takes sides. 
There is no bookish flavor a-bout the stories : they are as artless 
as the narrative told by a winter hearth. In the great mass of 
fiction dealing with New England life and character her work 
excels in humor— that subdued humor which permeates every 
part like an atmosphere— in the picturing of the odd and the 
whimsical, in tenderness and sympathy, and in the perfect art- 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 231 

lessness that is the last triumph of art. Hers is not a realism of 
the severe and scientific type : it is a poetic realism like that of 
the earlier and more delightful Howells, a realism that sees life 
through a window with the afternoon light upon it. In the whole 
output of the school there are few sketches more charming and 
more true than her "Miss Lucinda," "Freedom Wheeler's Con- 
troversy with Providence," "Old Miss Dodd," "The Deacon's 
Week," and "A Town and a Country Mouse." Others, like 
Mrs. Slosson and Rowdand E. Robinson, for instance, have caught 
with exquisite skill the grotesque and the humorous side of 
New England life, but none other has shown the whole of New 
England with the sympathy and the comprehension and the deli- 
cacy of Rose Terry Cooke. 

IV 

Of the later group, the generation bom in the fifties and the 
early sixties, Sarah Orne Jewett is the earliest figure. With her 
there was no preliminary dallying with mid-century sentiment 
and sensationalism; she belongs to the era of Oldtown Folks 
rather than of Uncle Tom's Cabin. "It was happily in the 
writer's childhood," she records in her later introduction to 
Deephaven, "that Mrs. Stowe had written of those who dwelt 
along the wooded sea-coast and by the decaying, shipless harbors 
of INIaine. The first cliapters of The Pearl of Orr's Island gave 
the young author of Deephaven to see with new eyes and to 
follow eagerly the old shore paths from one gray, weather- 
beaten house to another, where Genius pointed her the way." 
And again in a letter written in 1889 : "I have been reading the 
beginning of The Pearl of Orr's Island and finding it just as 
clear and perfectly original and strong as it seemed to me in my 
thirteenth or fourteenth year, when I read it first. I shall never 
forget the exquisite flavor and reality of delight it gave me. It is 
classical — historical. ' ' '^ 

She herself had been bom by one of those same "decaying, 
shipless harbors of Maine," at South Berwick, a village not far 
from the native Portsmouth of Thomas Bailey Aldrieh. It was 
no ordinary town, this deserted little port. "A stupid, common 
country town, some one dared to call Deephaven in a letter once, 

6 Letters of S. 0. Jewett, 47. 



232 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and how bitterly we resented it."^ It had seen better days. 
There was an atmosphere about it from a romantic past. In 
Miss Jewett's work it figures as Deephaven. "The place prided 
itself most upon having been long ago the residence of one Gov- 
ernor Chantrey, who was a rich ship-owner and East India mer- 
chant, and whose fame and magnificence were almost fabulous. 
. . . There were formerly five families who kept their coaches in 
Deephaven; there were balls at the Governor's and regal enter- 
tainments at other of the grand mansions; there is not a really 
distinguished person in the country who will not prove to have 
been directly or indirectly connected with Deephaven." And 
again, "Deephaven seemed more like one of the cozy little Eng- 
lish seaside towns than any other. It was not in the least Amer- 
ican. ' ' 

The social regime of this early Berwick had been cavalier rather 
than Puritan. It had survived in a few old families like the 
Jewetts, a bit of the eighteenth century come down into the late 
nineteenth. Miss Jewett all her life seemed like her own Miss 
Chauncey, an exotic from an earlier day, a survival — "thor- 
oughly at her ease, she had the manner of a lady of the olden 
time." Her father, a courtly man and cultivated, a graduate of 
Bowdoin and for a time a lecturer there, gave ever the impression 
that he could have filled with brilliancy a larger domain than that 
he had deigned to occupy. He had settled down in Berwick as 
physician for a wide area, much trusted and much revered, a 
physician who ministered to far more than the physical needs of 
his people. His daughter, with a daughter's loving hand, has 
depicted him in A Country Doctor, perhaps the most tender and 
intimate of all her studies. She owed much to him ; from him had 
come, indeed, the greater part of all that was vital in her educa- 
tion. Day after day she had ridden with him along the country 
roads, and had called with him at the farmhouses and cottages, 
and had talked with him of people and flowers and birds, of olden 
times, of art and literature. 

A story from her pen, "Mr. Bruce," signed "A. E. Eliot," had 
appeared in the Atlantic as early as 1869, but it was not until 
1873 that "The Shore House," changed later to "Kate Lan- 
caster's Plan," the first of the Deephaven papers, appeared in 
the same magazine. She had begun to write with a definite pur- 

7 Deephaven, 84. 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 233 

pose. "When I was perhaps fifteen," she records in an auto- 
biographical fragment, ''the first city boarders began to make 
their appearance near Berwick, and the way they misconstrued 
the country people and made game of their peculiarities fired me 
with indignation. I determined to teach the world that country 
people were not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to 
think. I wanted the world to know their grand simple lives; 
and, so far as I had a mission, when I first began to write, I think 
that was it. ' ' 

Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Cooke were the depicters of the older 
New England, the New England at flood tide ; Miss Jewett was 
the first to paint the ebb. With them New England was a social 
unit as stable as the England of Jane Austen ; with her it was a 
society in transition, the passing of an old regime. The west- 
ward exodus had begun, with its new elements of old people left 
behind by their migrating children, the deserted farm, the de- 
cajdng seaside town, the pathetic return of the native for a brief 
day, as in ''A Native of Winby," and, to crown it all, the sum- 
mer boarder who had come in numbers to laugh at the old and 
wonder at it. She would preserve all that was finest in the New 
England that was passing, and put it into clear light that all 
might see how glorious the past had been, and how beautiful and 
true were the pathetic fragments that still remained. 

She approached her work with the serenity and the seriousness 
of one who goes to devotions. She was never watchful for the 
eccentric and the picturesque ; there are no grotesque deacons and 
shrill old maids in her stories. She would depict only the finer 
and gentler side of New England life: men quiet and kindly; 
women sweet-tempered and serene. We may smile over her pic- 
tures of ancient mariners ''sunning themselves like turtles on the 
wharves," her weather-beaten farmers gentle as women, and her 
spinsters and matrons, like Miss Debby, belonging to "a class of 
elderly New England women which is fast dying out," but we 
leave them always with the feeling that they are noblemen and 
ladies in disguise. Her little stretch of Maine coast with its 
pointed firs, its bleak farms, and its little villages redolent of 
the sea she has made peculiarly her own domain, just as Hardy 
has made Wessex his, and she has made of her native Deephaven 
an American counterpart of Cranford. 

Many times Miss Jewett has been compared with Hawthorne, 



234 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and undoubtedly there is basis for comparison. Her style, in- 
deed, in its simplicity and effortless strength may be likened 
to his, and her pictures of decaying wharves and of quaint per- 
sonages in an old town by the sea have the same atmosphere and 
the same patrician air of distinction, but further one may not 
go. Of his power to trace the blighting and transforming effects 
of a sin and his wizard knowledge of the human heart, she had 
nothing. She is a writer of little books and short stories, the 
painter of a few subjects in a provincial little area, but within 
her narrow province she has no rival nearer her own times than 
Mrs. Gaskell. 

Her kinship is with Howells rather than with Hawthorne, the 
Howells of the earlier manner, with his pictures of the Boston 
of the East India days, his half-poetic studies in background and 
character, his portraits etched with exquisite art, his lambent 
humor that plays over all like an evening glow. In her stories, 
too, the plot is slight, and background and characterization and 
atmosphere dominate; and as with him in the days before the 
poet had been put to death, realism is touched everywhere with 
romance. She paints the present ever upon the background of 
an old, forgotten, far-off past, with that dim light upon it that 
now lies over the South of the old plantation days. Over all of 
her work lies this gentle glamour, this softness of atmosphere, this 
evanescent shade of regret for something vanished forever. Hers 
is a transfigured New England, a New England with all its rough- 
ness and coarseness and sordidness refined away, the New Eng- 
land undoubtedly that her gentle eyes actually saw. Once, in- 
deed, she wrote pure romance. Her The Tory Lover is her dream 
of New England's day of chivalry, the high tide mark from which 
to measure the depth of its ebb. 

Her power lies m her purity of style, her humorous little 
touches, and her power of characterization. Work like her "A 
White Heron," "Miss Tempy's Watchers," and ''The Dulham 
Ladies," has a certain lightness of touch, a pathos and a humor, 
a skill in delineation which wastes not a word or an effect, that 
places it among the most delicate and finished of American short 
stories. Yet brilliant as they are in technique, in characteriza- 
tion and background and atmosphere, they lack nevertheless the 
final touch of art. They are too literary; they are too much 
works of art, too much from the intellect and not enough from 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 235 

the heart. They are Sir Roger de Coverley sketches, marvelously 
well done, but always from the Sir Roger standpoint. There is 
a certain ''quality" in all that Miss Jewett wrote, a certain 
unconscious nohlcsse oblige that kept her ever in the realm of the 
gentle, the genteel, the Berwick old regime. One feels it in her 
avoidance of everything common and squalid, in her freedom 
from passion and dramatic climax, in her objective attitude to- 
ward her characters. She is always sympathetic, she is moved 
at times to real pathos, but she stands apart from her picture; 
she observes and describes; she never, like Rose Terry Cooke, 
mingles and shares. She cannot. Hers is the pride that the 
lady of the estate takes in her beloved peasantrj^ ; of the patrician 
who steps down of an afternoon into the cottage and comes back 
to tell with amusement and perhaps with tears of what she finds 
there. 

All her life she lived apart from that which she described. 
Her winters she spent in Boston, much of the time in the home 
of Mrs. James T. Fields, surrounded by memorials of the great 
period of American literature. Like Howells, she wrote ever in 
the presence of the Brahmins — a task not difficult, for she her- 
self was a Brahmin. It was impossible for her to be common 
or to be narrowly realistic. She wrote with deliberation and she 
revised and rerevised and finished her work, conscious ever of her 
art — a classicist, sending forth nothing that came as a cry 
from her heart, nothing that came winged with a message, 
nothing that voiced a vision and a new seeing, nothing that 
was not literary in the highest classical sense. In the history of 
the new period she stands midway between ]\Irs. Spofford and ]\Irs. 
Freeman; a new realist whose heart was with the old school; a 
romanticist, but equipped with a camera and a fountain pen. 



Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is the typical representative of the 
group born a generation after the women of the thirties, the 
group that knew nothing of the emotional fifties and sixties, and 
that began its work when the new literature of actuality, the 
realism of Flaubert and Hardy and Howells, was in full domina- 
tion. Of hesitancy, of transition from the old to the new, her 
fiction shows no trace. From her first story she was a realist, as 
enamoured of actuality and as restrained as ^laupassant. She 



236 AMEKICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

seems to have followed no one : realism was a thing native to her, 
as indeed it is native to all women. "Women are delicate and 
patient observers," Henry James has said in his essay on Trol- 
lope. ' ' They hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of 
life. They feel and perceive the real. ' ' But to her realism Miss 
Wilkins added a power usually denied her sex, the power of de- 
tachment, the epic power that excludes the subjective and hides 
the artist behind the picture. In all the writings of the creator 
of Gates Ajar we see but the intense and emotional soul of Eliza- 
beth Stuart Phelps; in that of the writer of A Humble Romance 
we see on\j the gi'im lineaments of New England, a picture as 
remorseless and as startling as if a searchlight had been turned 
into the dim and cobwebbed recesses of an ancient vault. She 
stands not aloof like IMiss Jewett ; she is simply unseen. She is 
working in the materials of her own heart and drawing the out- 
lines of her own home, yet she possesses the epic power to keep 
her creations imper&,onal to the point of anonymousness. 

For her work, everything in her life was a preparation. She 
was born in Randolph not far from Boston, of an ancestry which 
extended back into the darkest shadows of Puritanism, to old 
Salem and a judge in the witchcraft trials. Her more immediate 
progenitors were of humble station : her father was first a builder 
in her native Randolph, then a store-keeper in Brattleboro, 
Vermont. Thus her formative years were passed in the narrow 
environment of New England villages. The death of her father 
and mother during her early girlhood must also be recorded, as 
should the fact that her schooling was austere and limited. 

Wi\Qn she approached literature, therefore, it was as a daughter 
of the Puritans, as one who had been nurtured in repression. Love 
in its tropical intensity, the fierce play of the passions, color, pro- 
fusion, outspoken toleration, freedom — romance in its broadest 
connotation— of these she knew nothing. She had lived her whole 
life in the warping atmosphere of inherited Puritanism, of a Puri- 
tanism that had lost its earlier vitality and had become a conven- 
tion and a superstition, in a social group inbred for generations 
and narrowly restricted to neighborhood limits. "They were all 
narrow-lived country people," she writes. "Their customs had 
made deeper grooves in their roads ; they were more fastidious and 
jealous of their social rights than many in higher positions."* 
-, 8 The Twelfth Guest. 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 237 

"Everything out of the broad, common track was a horror to 
these men, and to many of their village fellows. Strange shadows 
that their eyes could not pierce, lay upon such, and they were 
suspicious."^ ''She was a New England woman, and she dis- 
cussed all topics except purely material ones shamefacedly with 
her sister. ' ' ^* 

In the mid eighties when she began her work the primitive 
Puritan element had vanished from all but the more remote and 
sheltered nooks of New England. The toll of the war, the West- 
ern rush, and the call of the cities had left behind the old and 
the conservative and the helpless, the last distorted relics of a 
distorting old regime. To her these were the true New England : 
she would write the last act of the grim drama that had begun 
at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. She recorded it very 
largely in her first four volumes : A Huinble Romance, twenty- 
four short stories as grim and austere as Puritanism itself; A 
New England Nun and Other Stories; Jane Field, a prolonged 
short story; and Pembroke, a Novel. This is the vital part of 
her work, the part that is to bear up and preserve her name if it 
is to endure. 

The key to this earlier work is the word repression. The very 
style is puritanic; it is angular, unomamented, severe; it is 
rheumatic like the greater part of the characters it deals with ; 
it gasps in short sentences and hobbles disconnectedly. It deals 
ever with repressed lives: with dwarfed and anemic old maids 
who have been exliorted all their lives to self-examination and to 
the repression of every emotion and instinct; with women un- 
balanced and neurotic, who subside at last into dumb endurance ; 
with slaves of a parochial public opinion and of conventions 
ridiculously narrow hardened into iron laws ; with lives in which 
the Puritan inflexibility and unquestioning obedience to duty has 
been inherited as stubbornness and balky setness, as in Deborah 
and Barnabas Thayer who in earlier ages would have figured as 
martyrs or pilgrims. 

Her unit of measure is short. It is not hers to trace the slow 
development of a soul through a long period ; it is hers to deal 
with climactic episodes, with the one moment in a repressed life 
when the repression gives way and the long pent-up forces sweep 

9 Christmas Jenny. 
10 Amanda and Love. 



238 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

all before them, as in "The Revolt of Mother," or "A Village 
Singer." Her effects she accomplishes with the fewest strokes 
possible. Like the true New Englander that she is, she will 
waste not a word. In her story "Life-Everlasting," Luella — the 
author's miserliness with words withholds her other name — ^has 
gone to carry a pillow to the farmhouse of Oliver "Weed. She 
wonders at the closed and deserted appearance of the premises. 

Luella heard the cows low in the barn as she opened the kitchen 
door. "Where — did all that — blood come fromf said she. 

She began to breathe in quick gasps; she stood clutching her pillow, 
and looking. Then she called: '''Mr. Weed! Mr. Weed! Where be 
you? Mis' Weed! Is anythmg the matter? Mis' Weed!" The si- 
lence seemed to beat agauast her ears. She went across the kitchen to 
the bedroom. Here and there she held back her dress. She reached 
the bedroom door, and looked in. 

Luella pressed back across the kitchen into the yard. She went out 
into the yard and turned towards the village. She still carried the life- 
everlasting pillow, but she carried it as if her arms and that were all 
stone. She met a woman whom she knew, and the woman spoke; but 
Luella did not notice her; she kept on. The woman stopped and looked 
after her. 

Luella went to the house where the sheriff lived, and knocked. The 
sheriff himself opened the door. He was a large, pleasant man. He 
began saying something facetious about her being out calling early, but 
Luella stopped him. 

"You 'd — better go up to the — Weed house," said she, in a dry voice, 
"There 's some — trouble." 

That is all we are told as to what Luella saw, though it comes 
out later that the man and his wife had been murdered by the 
hired man — how we know not. There is a primitiveness about 
the style, its gasping shortness of sentence, its repetitions like the 
story told by a child, its freedom from all straining for effect, 
its bareness and grimness, that stamps it as a genuine human 
document; not art but life itself. 

For external nature she cares little. Her backgrounds are 
meager; the human element alone interests her. There is no 
Mary E. Wilkins country as there is a Sarah Orne Jewett coun- 
try; there are only Mary E. Wilkins people. A somber group 
they are— exceptions, perhaps, grim survivals, distortions, yet 
absolutely true to one narrow phase of New England life. Her 
realism as she depicts these people is as inexorable as Balzac's. 
'A Village Lear" would have satisfied even Maupassant. Not 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 239 

one jot is bated from the full horror of the picture ; it is driven 
to its pitiless end without a moment of softening. No detail is 
omitted. It is Pere Goriot reduced to a chapter. A picture like 
this from ''Louisa" grips one by its very pitilessness : 

There was nothing for supper but some bread and butter and weak 
tea, though the old man had his dish of Indian-meal porridge. He 
could not eat much solid food. The porridge was covered with milk 
and molasses. He bent low over it, and ate large spoonfuls with loud 
noises. His daughter had tied a towel around his neck as she would 
have tied a pinafore on a child. She had also spread a towel over the 
tablecloth in front of him, and she watched him sharply lest he should 
spill his food. 

''I wish I could have somethin* to eat that I could relish the way he 
does that porridge and molasses," said she [the mother]. She had 
scarcely tasted anything. She sipped her weak tea laboriously. 

Louisa looked across at her mother's meager little figure in its neat 
old dress, at her poor small head bending over the teacup, showing the 
wide parting in the thin hair. 

"Why don't you toast your bread, mother f said she. "I'll toast it 
for you." 

"No, I don't want it. I 'd jest as soon have it this way as any. I 
don't want no bread, nohow. I want somethin' to relish — a herrin', or 
a little mite of cold meat, or somethin'. I s'pose I could eat as well 
as anj'body if I had as much as some folks have. Mis' Mitchell was 
sayin' the other day that she did n't believe but what they had butcher's 
meat up to Mis' Nye's evei-y day in the week. She said Jonathan he 
went to Wolfsborough and brought home great pieces in a market- 
basket every week." 

She is strong only in short efforts. She has small power of 
construction : even Pembroke may be resolved into a series of 
short stories. The setness of Barnabas Tliayer is prolonged until 
it ceases to be convincing : we lose sympathy ; he becomes a mere 
Ben Jonson "humor" and not a human being. The story is 
strong only in its episodes — the cherry party of the tight-fisted 
Silas Berry, the midnight coasting of the boy Ephraiin, the re- 
moval of Hannah to the poorhouse, the marriage of Rel)ecca — 
but these touch the very heart of New England. Because of their 
artlessness they are the perfection of art. 

In her later period Miss Wilkins became sophisticated and self- 
conscious. The acclaim of praise that greeted her short stories 
tempted her to essay a larger canvas in wider fields of art. She 
had awakened to a realization of the bareness of her style and slie 
sought to bring to her work ornament and the literary graces. 



240 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

She experimented with verse and drama and juveniles, with long 
novels and romances, and even with tales of New Jersey life. In 
vain. Her decline began with Madelon, which is improbable and 
melodramatic, and it continued through all her later work. She 
wrote problem novels like The Portion of Labor, long and sprawl- 
ing and ineffective, and stories like By the Light of the Soul, as 
impossible and as untinie to life as a young country girl's dream 
of city society. As a novelist and as a depicter of life outside of 
her narrow domain, she has small equipment. She stands for 
but one thing : short stories of the grim and bare New England 
social system; sketches austere and artless which limn the very 
soul of a passing old regime ; photographs which are more than 
photographs: which are threnodies. 

VI * 

The last phase of the school may be studied in the work of 
Alice Brown, representative of the influences at the end of the 
century. The late recognition of her fiction — she was born in 
1857 — which placed her a decade after Miss Wilkins who was 
born in 1862, compelled her to serve an apprenticeship like that of 
Ho wells, and subjected her work to the new shaping influences of 
the nineties. "When she did gain recognition in 1895, she brought 
a finished art. She had mastered the newly worked-out science 
of the short story, she had studied the English masters — chiefest 
of all Stevenson, whose influence so dominated the closing cen- 
tury. 

She was not a realist as Miss Wilkins was a realist. The New 
England dialect stories of Meadow Grass were not put forth to 
indicate the final field that she had chosen for her art : they were 
experiments just as all the others of her earlier efforts were ex- 
periments. Of her first seven books. Fools of Nature, with its 
background of spiritualism, was a serious attempt at serious 
fiction with a thesis worthy of a George Eliot, Mercy Warren and 
Robert Louis Stevenson were biographical and critical studies, 
By Oak and Thorn was a collection of travel essays. The Road to 
Castelay was a collection of poems, and The Day of His Youth 
perhaps a romance. 

That she won her recognition as a writer of dialect tales rather 
than as a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a romancer, was due, first, 
to the nature of the times, and, secondly, to the fact that the 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 241 

tales were a section of her own life written with fullness of 
knowledge and sympathy. She had been born and reared in a 
New Hampshire town, educated in a country school and a rural 
"female seminary," and, like Rose Terry Cooke, she had taught 
school. Later she had broken from this early area of her life 
and had resided in Boston. The glamour of childhood grew 
more and more golden over the life she had left behind her ; the 
memories of fragrant summer evenings in the green country and 
of the old homes she had known with all their varied inmates 
grew ever more tender on her pages as she wrote. It was impos- 
sible for her not to be true to this area that she knew so com- 
pletely. Characters like Mrs. Blair and Miss Dyer in ''Joint 
Owners in Spain," or Farmer Eli in "Farmer Eli's Vacation" 
stood living before her imagination as she told of them. She had 
known them in the flesh. If she were to paint the picture at all 
she must paint it as it was in her heart. To add to it or to sub- 
tract from it were to violate truth itself. 

Her stories differ from Mrs. Cooke's and Miss Jewett's in a 
certain quality of atmosphere — it is difficult to explain more 
accurately. They have a quality of humor and of pathos, a 
sprightliness and freedom about them that are all their own. 
They never fall into carelessness like so much of the work of IMrs. 
Stowe and they are never poorly constructed. They are photo- 
graphically true to the life they represent, and yet they possess, 
many of them, the beauties and the graces and the feeling of 
romance. They add richness to realism. In style she is the 
antithesis of Miss Wilkins. There is beauty in all of her prose, 
a half -felt tripping of feet often, a lilting rhythm as unpremedi- 
tated as a bird-song, swift turns of expression that are near 
to poetry. An inscription in the Tiverton churchyard halts her, 
and as she muses upon it she is wholly a poet : 

"The p,urple flower of a maid"! All the blossomy sweetness, the 
fragrant lament of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor love- 
lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we ac- 
cord the dead, but dowered with another youth set like a crown upon 
the unstained front of this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened 
or decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in perfume. She 
seems so sweet in her still loveliness, the empty province of her balmy 
spring, that, for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the 
pageant of your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer 
for her loss. And yet, not so, since the world holds other greater 



242 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and stature, but 
here she lives yet in beauteous permanence — as true a part of youth 
and joy and rapture as the immortal figures on the Grecian urn. Wliile 
she was but a flying phantom on the frieze of time, Death fixed her 
there forever — a haunting spirit in perennial bliss. 

Whenever she touches nature she touches it as a poet. She 
was of the mid nineties which saw the triumph of the nature 
school. Behind each of her stories lies a rich background of 
mountain or woodland or meadow, one that often, as in "A Sea 
Change, ' ' dominates in Thomas Hardy fashion the whole picture. 

Only a comparatively few of Miss Brown's volumes deal with 
the field with which her name is chiefly associated. Meadow 
Grass, Tiverton Tales, and The Country Road contain the best 
of her dialect stories. Her heart in later years has been alto- 
gether in other work. She has written novels not provincial in 
their setting, and, unlike Miss Wilkins, she has succeeded in 
doing really distinctive work. She has the constructive power 
that is denied so many, especially women, who have succeeded 
with the short story. She has done dramatic work which has 
won high rewards and she has written poetry. Perhaps she is a 
poet first of all. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hakbiet Beechee Stowe. The Mayflower, 1843; Uncle Tom's Cabin, 
1852; Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854; Dred (Nina Gordon), 
1856; The Minister's Wooing, 1859; The Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862; 
Agnes of Sorrento, 1862; House and Home Papers, 1864; Little Foxes, 
1865; Religious Poems, 1867; Queer Little People, 1867; The Chimney 
Corner, 1868; Oldtown Folks, 1869; Pink and White Tyranny, 1871; Old- 
toion Fireside Stories, 1871; My Wife and I, 1871; We and Our Neighbors, 
1875; Poganuc People, 1878; A Dog's Mission, 1881; The Life of Harriet 
Beecher Stowe, Charles Edward Stowe, 1889. 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Tiny, 1866; The Gates Ajar, 1868; 
Men, Women, and Ghosts, 1869; Hedged In, 1870; The Silent Partner, 
1870; Poetic Studies, 1875; The Story of Avis, 1877; An Old Maid's Paror 
disc, 1879; Doctor Zay, 1882; Beyond the Gates, 1883; Songs of the 
Silent World, 1884; The Madonna of the Tubs, 1886; The Gates Betiveen, 
1887; Jack the Fisherman, 1887; The Struggle for Immortality, 1889; 
The Master of the Magicians [with H. D. Ward], 1890; Come Forth 
[with H. D. Ward], 1890; Fourteen to One, 1891; Donald Marcy, 1893; 
A Singular Life, 1894; The Supply at St. Agatha's, 1896; Chapters from 
a Life, 1896; The Story of Jesus Christ, 1897; Within the Gates, 1901; 
Successors to Mary the First, 1901; Avery, 1902; Trixy, 1904; The Man in 
the Case, 1906; Walled In, 1907. 



RECORDERS OF NEW ENGLAND DECLINE 243 

Harriet Prescott Spofford. Sir Rohan's Ghost, 1859; The Amber 
Oods and Other Stories, 1863; Azarian, 1864; New England Legends, 
1871; The Thief in the Night, 1872; Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 
1881; The Marquis of Carabas, 1882; Poems, 1882; Ballads About Au- 
thors, 1888; In Titian's Garden and Other Poems, 1897; The Children of 
the Valley, 1901; The Great Procession, 1902; Four Days of God, 1905; 
Old Washington, 1906; Old Madame and Other Tragedies, 1910. 

EOSE Terry Cooke. Poems by Pose Terry, 1860; Happy Dodd, 1875; 
Somebody's Neighbors, 1881; The Deacon's Week, 1885; Root-Bound and 
Other Sketches, 1885; No. A Story for Boys, 1886; The Sphijnx's Children 
and Other People's, 1886; Poems by Rose Terry Cooke (complete), 1888; 
Steadfast: a Novel, 1889; Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, 
1891. 

Sarah Orne Jewett. Deephaven, 1877; Old Friends and New, 1879; 
Country By-Ways, 1881; The Mate of the Daylight, 1883; A Country 
Doctor, 1884; A Marsh Island, 1885; A White Heron, 1886; The Story 
of the Normans, 1887; The King of Folly Island, 1888; Betty Leicester, 
1889; Strangers and Wayfarers, 1890; A Native of Winby, 1893; Betty 
Leicester's Christmas, 1894; The Life of Nancy, 1895; The Country of the 
Pointed Firs, 1896; The Queen's Twin, 1899; The Tory Lover, 1901; Letters 
of Sarah Orne Jewett, Edited by Annie Fields. 

Mary E. Welkins Freeman. A Humble Romance, 1887; A New Eng- 
land Nun, 1891; Young Lucretia, 1892; Jane Field, 1892; Giles Corey, 
Yeoman: a Play, 1893; Pembroke, 1894; Madelon, 1896; Jerome, a Poor 
Young Man, 1897; Silence, 1898; Evelina's Garden, 1899; The Love of 
Parson Lord, 1900; The Heart's Highway, 1900; The Portion of Labor, 
1901; Understudies, 1901; Sij; Trees, 1903; The Wind in the Rose Bush, 
1903; The Givers, 1904; Doc Gordon, 1906; By the Light of the Soul, 
1907; Shoulders of Atlas, 1908; The Winning Lady, 1909; The Green 
Door, 1910; Butterfly House, 1912; Yates Pride, 1912. 

Alice Brown. Fools of Nature, 1887; Meadow Grass, 1895; Mercy 
Otis Warren, 1896; By Oak and Thorn, 1896; The Day of His Youth, 
1896; The Road to Castaly, 1896; Robert Louis Stevenson — a Study (with 
Louise Imogen Guiney), 1897; Tiverton Tales, 1899; King's End, 1901; 
Margaret Warrener, 1901 ; The Mannerings, High Noo7i, Paradise, The 
Country Road, The Court of Love, 1906; Rose MacLeod, 1908; The Story 
of Thyrza, 1909; County Neighbors, John Winterbourne's Family, 1910; 
The One-Footed Fairy, 1911; The Secret of the Clan, 1912; Vanishing 
Points, Robin Hood's Barn, 1913; Children of Earth, [$10,000 prize 
drama], 1915. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE NEW ROMANCE 

The noTelists who began their work in the seventies found 
themselves in a dilemma. On one side was the new school which 
was becoming more and more insistent that literature in America 
must be a thing American, colored by American soil, and vivid 
and vital with the new spirit of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hardy, Maupas- 
sant, Howells, that was thrilling everywhere like the voice of a 
coming era. But on the other hand tlier'e was the firmly set tra- 
dition that the new world was barren of literary material, that 
it lay spick and span with no romantic backgrounds save per- 
haps the Dutch Hudson and old Puritan Salem and colonial Bos- 
ton. As late as 1872 the North American Review declared that 
the true writer of fiction "must idealize. The idealizing novel- 
ists will be the real novelists. All truth does not lie in facts. ' ' ^ 
And it further declared that he must look away from his own 
land, where there is no shadow and no antiquity, into the un- 
charted fields of the imagination. "One would say that the 
natural tendency of the American novelist would be toward 
romance ; that the very uniformity of our social life would offer 
nothing tempting to the writer, unless indeed to the satirist. ' ' ^ 

It was the voice of the school that had ruled the mid century, 
a school that was still alive and was still a dominating force of 
which young writers were tremendously conscious. The reading 
public was not prepared for the new realism: it had been nur- 
tured on The Token and The Talisman. The new must come 
not as a revolution, swift and sudden; but as an evolution, slow 
and imperceptible. During the seventies even Howells and 
James were romancers ; romancers, however, in process of change. 

For the seventies in the history of American fiction was a 
period of compromise and transition. The new school would 
be romantic and yet at the same time it would be realistic. The 

i North American Review, 115:373. 
244 



THE NEW ROMANCE 245 

way opened unexpectedly. The widening of the American hori- 
zon, the sudden vogue of the Pike literature, the new exploiting 
of the continent in all its wild nooks and isolated neighborhoods 
— strange areas as unknown to the East as the California mines 
and the canebrakes of the great river — and above all the emer- 
gence of the South, brought with it another discovery: Haw- 
thorne and the mid-century school had declared romance with 
American background impossible simply because in their pro- 
vincial narrowness they had supposed that America was bounded 
on the south and west by the Atlantic and the Hudson. America 
was discovered to be full of romantic material. It had a past 
not connected at all with the Knickerbockers or even the Pil- 
grims. Behind whole vast areas of it lay the shadow of old 
forgotten regimes, ' ' picturesque and gloomy wrongs, ' ' with ruins 
and mystery and vague tradition. 

One of the earliest results, then, of the new realism, strangely 
enough, was a new romanticism, new American provinces added 
to the bounds of Arcady. The first gold of it, appropriately 
enough, came from California, where Harte and Mrs. Jack- 
son caught glimpses of an old Spanish civilization alive only in 
the picturesque ruins of its Missions. Quickly it was found 
again, rich and abundant, in New Orleans, where Spain and then 
France had held dominion in a vague past; then in the planta- 
tions of the old South where Page and others caught the last 
glories of that fading cavalier civilization which had been pro- 
longed through a century of twilight by the archaic institution 
of slavery; and then even in the spick-and-span new central 
West with its traditions of a chivalrous old French regime. 

America, indeed, was full of romantic area, full of a truly 
romantic atmosphere, for it had been for centuries the battle- 
field of races, the North — England, New England, Anglo-Saxons 
— against the South — Spain, France, the slave-holding Cavaliers. 
And romance in all lands is the record of the old crushed out 
by the new, the dim tradition of a struggle between North and 
South: the South with its tropic imagination, its passion, its 
beauty, its imperious pride, its barbaric background; the North 
with its logic, its discipline, its perseverance, its passionless force. 
Romance has ever held as its theme the passing of an old South- 
ern regime before the barbarians of the North. And romance 
in America has centered always in the South. Realism might 



246 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

flourish in Boston and the colder classical atmospheres, but not 
along the gulf and the tropic rivers. The reading public, how- 
ever, and the great publishing houses were in the North. The 
result was compromise : the new romanticism, Southern in its 
atmosphere and spirit, Northern in its truth to life and condi- 
tions. 

I 

Harte in Gabriel Conroy glimpsed the new fields of romance; 

George Washington Cable (1844 ), the earliest of the new 

Southern school, was the first fully to enter them. His gateway 
was old New Orleans, most romantic of Southern cities, unknown 
to Northern readers until his pen revealed it. It seemed hardly 
possible that the new world possessed such a Bagdad of wonder: 
old Spanish aristocracy, French chivalry of a forgotten ancien 
regime, Creoles, Acadians from the Grand Pre dispersion, ad- 
venturers from all the picturesque ports of the earth, slavery 
with its barbaric atmosphere and its shuddery background of 
dread, and behind it all and around it all like a mighty moat 
shutting it close in upon itself and rendering all else in the world 
a mere hearsay and dream, the swamps and lagoons of the great 
river. 

Cable was a native of the old city. During a happy boy- 
hood he played and rambled over the whole of it and learned 
to know it as only a boy can know the surroundings of his home. 
His boyhood ended when he was fourteen with the death of his 
father and the responsibility that devolved upon him to help 
support his mother and her little family left with scanty means. 
There was to be no more schooling. He marked boxes in the cus- 
tom house until the war broke out, and then at seventeen he 
enlisted in the Confederate army and served to the end. Re- 
turning to New Orleans, he found employment in a newpaper 
ofiice, where he proved a failure; he studied surveying until he 
was forced by malarial fever caught in the swamps to abandon 
it; then, after a slow recovery, he entered the employ of a firm 
of cotton factors and for years served them as an accountant. 
It was an unpromising beginning. At thirty-five he was still 
recording transfers of cotton, and weights and prices and com- 
missions. 

But his heart, like Charles Lamb's, was in volumes far differ- 



THE NEW ROMANCE 247 

ent from those upon his office desk. He had always been a 
studious youth. He had read much: Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, 
Irving, Scott; and, like a true native of the old city to whom 
French was a mother tongue, Hugo, Merimee, About. He loved 
also to pore over antiquarian records: Relations of the priest 
explorers, and old French documents and writings. His first 
impulse to write came to him as he sat amid these dusty records. 
"It would give me pleasure," he once wrote in a letter, "to tell 
you how I came to drop into the writing of romances, but I can- 
not; I just dropt. Money, fame, didactic or controversial im- 
pulse I scarcely felt a throb of. I just wanted to do it because 
it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste. ' ' 

Cable's first story, " 'Sieur George," appeared in Scribner's 
Monthly in October, 1873. Edward King, touring the Southern 
States in 1872 for his series of papers entitled The Great South, 
had found the young accountant pottering away at his local his- 
tory and his studies of local conditions and had secured some of his 
work for Dr. Holland. During the next three years five other 
articles were published in the magazine and one, ' ' Posson Jone, ' ' 
in Appleton's, but they caused no sensation. It was not until 
1879, when the seven stories were issued in book form as Old 
Creole Days, that recognition came. The long delay was good 
for Cable: it compelled him, in Hawthorne fashion, to brood 
over his early work in his rare intervals of leisure, to contemplate 
each piece a long time, and to finish it and enrich it. He put 
forth no immaturities ; he began to publish at the point where his 
art was perfect. 

The reception accorded to Old Creole Days was like that ac- 
corded to Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. It took its place at 
once as a classic, and the verdict has never been questioned. 
There is about the book, and the two books which quickly fol- 
lowed it, an exotic quality, an aura of strangeness, that is like 
nothing else in our literature. They seem not American at all ; 
surely such a background and such an atmosphere as that never 
could have existed "within the bounds of our stalwart republic." 
They are romance, one feels; pure creations of fancy, prolonga- 
tions of the Longfellowism of the mid century — and yet, as one 
reads on and on, the conviction grows that they are not romance ; 
they are really true. Surely ' * Posson Jone ' ' and ' ' Madame Del- 
phine" are not creations of fancy. The elided and softly lisping 



248 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

dialect, broken-down French rather than debased English, is not 
an invention of the author's: it carries conviction the more one 
studies it ; it is not brought in to show : it adds at every point to 
the reality of the work. And the carefully worked-in back- 
grounds—let Lafcadio Heam speak, who settled in the city a few 
months after ''Jean-ah Poquelin" came out in Scribner's 
Monthly: 

The strict perfection of his Creole architecture is readily reeog-nized 
by all who have resided in New Orleans. Each one of those charming- 
pictures of places — veritable pastels — was painted after some carefully 
selected model of French or Franco-Spanish origin — typifying fashions 
of building which prevailed in the colonial days. , . . The author of 
Madame Delphine must have made many a pilgrimage into the quaint 
district, to study the wrinkled faces of the houses, or perhaps to read 
the queer names upon the signs — as Balzac loved to do in old-fashioned 
Paris.2 

It is realism, and yet how far removed from Zola and Flau- 
bert — Flaubert with his ' ' sentiment is the devil " ! It is realism 
tempered with romance ; it is the new romance of the transition. 
There is seemingly no art about it, no striving for effect, and 
there is no exhibition of quaint and unusual things just because 
they are quaint and unusual. Rather are we transported into 
a charmed atmosphere, "the tepid, orange-scented air of the 
South," with the soft Creole patois about ns and romance become 
real. The very style is Creole — Creole as Cable knew the Cre- 
oles of the quadroon type. There is a childish simplicity about 
it, and there is a lightness, an epigrammatic finesse, an elision of 
all that can be suggested, that is Gallic and not Saxon at all. 

One can feel this exotic quality most fully in the portraits of 
women: 'Tite Poulette, Madame Delphine, Aurora Nancanou, 
Clotilde, and the others, portraits etched in with infinitesimal 
lightness of touch, suggested rather than described, felt rather 
than seen. These are not Northern women, these daintily femi- 
nine survivals of a decadent nobility, these shrinking, coquettish, 
clinging, distant, tearful, proud, explosive, half barbarous, alto- 
gether bewitching creatures. A suggestion here, a glimpse there, 
an exclamation, a flash of the eyes, and they are alive and real 
as few feminine creations in the fiction of any period. One may 
forget the story, but one may not forget Madame Delphine, If 

2 "Scenes of Cable's Romances," Century, 5 : 40. 



THE NEW ROMANCE 249 

one would understand the secret of Cable's art, that Gallic 
lightness of touch, that subtle elision, that perfect balance be- 
tween the suggested and the expressed, let him read the last chap- 
ter of The Grandissimes. It is a Cable epitome. 

"Posson Jone," "Jean-ah Poquelin," and Madame Delpliine, 
which, despite its length and its separate publication, is a short 
story belonging to the Old Creole Days group, are among the 
most perfect of American short stories and mark the highest 
reach of Cable's art. 

The Grandissimes, his first long romance, appeared in 1880. 
Never was work of art painted on broader canvas or with ele- 
ments more varied and picturesque. Though centering in a 
little nook among the bayous, it contains all Louisiana. Every- 
where perspectives down a long past : glimpses of the explorers, 
family histories, old forgotten wrongs, vendettas, survivals from 
a feudal past, wild traditions, superstitions. Grandissime and 
Fusilier, young men of the D 'Iberville exploring party, get lost 
in the swamps. "When they had lain down to die and had 
only succeeded in falling to sleep, the Diana of the Tchoupi- 
toulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came 
upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and 
beauty, and fell sick of love." The love of this Indian queen 
begins the romance. Both eager to possess her, they can settle the 
matter only with dice. Fusilier wins and becomes the founder 
of a proud line, semibarbarous in its haughtiness and beauty, 
the Capulets to De Grapion's Montagues. The culmination 
comes a century later when the old feudal regime in Louisiana 
was closed by Napoleon and the remnants of the warring fam- 
ilies were united according to the approved Montague-Capulet 
formula. 

But the theme of the book is wider than this quarrel of fam- 
ilies, wider than the conflict of two irreconcilable civilizations 
and the passing of the outworn. In a vague way it centers in 
the episode of Bras Coupe, the African king who refused to be 
a slave and held firm until his haughty soul was crushed out with 
inconceivable brutality. The cumulative and soul-withering 
power of an ancient wrong, the curse of a dying man which works 
its awful way until the pure love of innocent lovers removes it — 
it is The House of the Seven Gables transferred to the barbar- 
ous swamps of the Atchafalaya. 



250 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The strangeness of the book grows upon one as one reads. 
It is a book of lurid pictures — the torture and death of Bras 
Coupe, the murder of the negresse Clemence, which in sheer hor- 
ror and brutal, unsparing realism surpasses anything in Uncle 
Tom's Cabin, anything indeed in the Russian realists. It is a 
book too with a monotone of fear : the nameless dread that comes 
of holding down a race by force, or as Joel C. Harris has phrased 
it, "that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever 
lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and 
ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps and steal forth under 
the midnight stars to murder and rapine and pillage"; the 
superstitious thrill when at dead of night throbs up from a 
neighboring slave yard "the monotonous chant and machine- 
like time-beat of the African dance ' ' ; the horror of finding morn- 
ing after morning on one's pillow voodoo warnings and ghastly 
death charms placed seemingly by supernatural hands. No one 
has ever surpassed Cable in making felt this uncanny side of the 
negro. His characterization of the voodoo quadroon woman 
Palmyre with her high Latin, Jaloff-African ancestry, her "bar- 
baric and magnetic beauty that startled the beholder like the un- 
expected drawing out of a jeweled sword," her physical perfec- 
tion — lithe of body as a tigress and as cruel, witching and allur- 
ing, yet a thing of horror, "a creature that one would want to 
find chained" — it fingers at one's heart and makes one fear. 

And with all this strangeness, this flash after flash of vivid 
characterization, a style to match. "Victor Hugo," one ex- 
claims often as one reads. Let us quote, say from chapter five. 
The stars are Cable's: 

There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determmation 
to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissiraes. 

"My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse ; "it is 
useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we 
will try another plan. Thank you," he added, as she handed his coat 
back to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new 
plan, Madame De Grapion — the precious little heroine! — before the 
myrtles offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much 
smaller (saith tradition) than herself. 

Only one thing qualified the fathei-'s elation. On that very day Numa 
Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, re- 
ceived from Governor De Vaudreuil a eadetship. 

"Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we 
shall see! Ha! we shall see!" 



THE NEW ROMANCE 251 

"We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family. "Will 
Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?" 

»********♦ 

Bang ! Bang ! 
Alas, Madame De Grapion ! 

It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a 
braver little widow. 

It is French, too, in its sudden turns, its fragmentary para- 
graphs, its sly humor, its swift summings-up with an epigram : 

"Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we '11 return to our senses." 
■'Now I '11 put on my feathers again," says the plucked bird. 

But as one reads on one realizes more and more that this style 
comes from no mere imitation of a master : it is Creole ; it is the 
style that is the counterpart of the Creole temperament. It is 
verisimilitude ; it is interpretation. 

Thus far the strength of the book; there are weaknesses as 
great. Cable failed, as Harte failed, as most of the masters 
of the short story have failed, in constructive power. The mag- 
nificent thesis of the romance is not worked out ; it is barely sug- 
gested rather than made to dominate the piece. Moreover, the in- 
terest does not accumulate and culminate at the end. It is a 
rich mass of materials rather than a finished romance. The em- 
phasis is laid upon characters, episodes, conditions, atmosphere, 
to the neglect of construction. From it Cable might have woven 
a series of perfect short stories: some parts indeed, like the tale 
of Bras Coupe, are complete short stories as they stand. The 
book is a gallery'- rather than a single work of art. 

Dr. Sevier, 1885, marks the beginning of Cable's later ^iyle, 
the beginning of the decline in his art. The year before he had 
taken up his permanent residence in Massachusetts and now as 
a literary celebrity, with Boston not far, he became self-conscious 
and timid. His art had matured in isolation ; there had been an 
elemental quality about it that had come from his very narrow- 
ness and lack of formal education. In the classic New England 
atmosphere the Gallic element, the naive simplicity, the elfin 
cliarm that had made his early writings like no others, faded 
out of his art. It was as if Burns after the Kilmarnock edition 
had studied poetry at Oxford and then had settled in literary 
Itondon. Doctor Sevier is not a romance at all; it is a realistic 



252 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

novel of the Howells type, a study of the Civil War period as 
it had passed under Cable's own eyes, with no plot and no cul- 
minating love interest. It is a running chronicle of ten years in 
the lives of John and Mary Richling, tedious at times, impeded 
with problem discussion and philosophizing. Its strength lies 
in its characterization : the Italian Ristofalo and his Irish wife are 
set off to the life ; but why should the creator of Madame Del- 
phine and Posson Jone and Palmyre turn to Irish and Italian 
characterization? The story, too, has the same defects as The 
Grandissimes : it lacks proportion and balance. With a large 
canvas Cable becomes always awkward and ineffective. With 
Bonaventure, graphic as parts of it unquestionably are, one posi- 
tively loses patience. Its plan is chaotic. At the end, where 
should come the climax of the plot, are inserted three long chap- 
ters telling with minute and terrifying realism the incidents of 
a flood in the canebrakes. It is magnificent, yet it is " lumber. ' ' 
It is introduced apparently to furnish background for the death 
of the "Cajun," but the ''Cajun" is only an incidental figure 
in the book. To deserve such ''limelight" he should have been 
the central character who had been hunted with increasing in- 
terest up to the end and his crime and his punishment should 
have been the central theme. 

With Madame Delphine (1881) had closed the first and the 
great period in Cable's literary career. The second period was 
a period of miscellany: journalized articles on the history and 
the characteristics of the Creoles, on New Orleans and its life, 
on Louisiana, its history and traditions, on phases of social re- 
form. Necessary as this work may have been, one feels inclined 
to deplore it. When one has discovered new provinces' in the 
realm of gold one does not well, it would seem, to lay aside his 
magic flute and prepare guide books to the region. 

The New England atmosphere brought to life a native area in 
Cable. His mother had been of New England ancestry. Moral 
wrestlings, questions of reform, problems of conscience, were a 
part of his birthright. One feels it even in his earliest work: 
he had seen, we feel, the problem of The Grandissimes before he 
had found the story. After his removal to Northampton, Massa- 
chusetts, it may be said that reform work became his real profes- 
sion. Not that we criticize his choice, for life ever is greater 
than mere art; we record it simply because it explains. He 



THE NEW ROMANCE 253 

formed home culture clubs for the education and the esthetic 
culture of wage-earners, and conducted a magazine in the inter- 
est of the work; he interested himself actively in the cause of 
the negro; so actively, indeed, that after his Silent South and 
The Negro Question and the problem novel John March, South- 
erner, the South practically disowned him. 

His third period begins, perhaps, with his novel Strong Hearts 
in 1899. The pen that so long had been dipped in controversy 
and journalism and philanthropic propaganda again essayed 
fiction, but it was too late. The old witchery was gone. His 
later novels, all his fiction indeed after Madame Delphine, with 
the exception perhaps of parts of Bonaventure, read as if writ- 
ten by a disciple of the earlier Cable. The verve, the sly humor, 
the Gallic finesse, the Creole strangeness and charm, have dis- 
appeared. There is a tightening in the throat as one reads the 
last page of Madame Delphine, there is a flutter of the heart as 
one reads the love story of Honore and Aurora, but nothing 
grips one as he reads The Cavalier. A pretty little story, un- 
doubtedly, but is it possible that the author of it once wrote 
"Poison Jone" and "Jean-ah Poquelin"? And Gideon's 
Band, a romance with an attempt to win back the old witchery 
of style — it was all in vain. Why say more ? 

Cable as a short story writer, a maker of miniatures with mar- 
velous skill of touch, was most successful perhaps with dainty 
femininities of the old regime. Once, twice, thrice the light of 
romance glowed upon his page. Then he became a reformer, 
a journalist, a man with a problem. But he who gave to Ameri- 
can literature Madame Delphine and Old Creole Days need not 
fear the verdict of coming days. Already have these works be- 
come classics. 

II 

The old Spanish regime in America furnished the theme of 
Lewis Wallace's (1827-1905) first romance, The Fair God, pub- 
lished the year " 'Sieur George" appeared in Scrihner's. He 
had returned from the Mexican War interested in Aztec an- 
tiquities. After the Civil War, in which lie took a prominent 
part, he began in the intervals of his law practice to write a mili- 
tary romance centering about Cortez and the conquest, and in 
1873, through the efforts of Whitelaw Reid, succeeded in having 



254 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

it published in Boston. It was not, however, until 1884, after 
the enormous popularity of Ben Hur, that it was discovered by 
the reading public. It is really better in workmanship and 
proportions than its more highly colored and vastly more ex- 
ploited companion; it moves strongly, its battle scenes have a 
resonance and excitement about them that make them comparable 
even with Scott's, but its tendency is to sentiment and melo- 
drama : it is a blending of Prescott and Bulwer-Lytton. 

A far more distinctive study of old Spanish days is to be 
found in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, undoubtedly the 
strongest romance of the period, Mrs. Jackson was a daughter 
of Professor Nathan W. Fiske of Amherst, Massachusetts, and 
until the last decade of her life was a resident of her native 
New England. Not until she was thirty-five and had been bereft 
of husband and children did she attempt literature. Her first 
form of expression was poetry, the short, sharp cry of desola- 
tion, narrowly personal and feminine. Then she wrote travel 
sketches and juveniles and moral essays, and then an outpouring 
of fiction intense and sentimental. During the seventies and the 
early eighties her work was in all the magazines. So versatile 
and abundant was she that at one time Dr. Holland seriously 
contemplated an issue of Scribner's made up wholly of her con- 
tributions. 

To almost nothing of her work, save that at the very last, 
did she sign her own name. She had an aversion to publicity 
that became really a mannerism. Her early work she signed 
variously or not at all, then for a time she settled upon the ini- 
tials "H. H." It is no secret now that she wrote the much- 
speculated-upon novels Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's 
Strange History in the No-Name Series, and that the Saxe Holm 
Stories, which furnished the literary mystery of the seventies, 
were from her pen. They are love stories of the Lamplighter 
school of fiction, sentimental, over-intense, moralizing. General 
and colorless as most of them are, they here and there display a 
rare power of characterization and a sharply drawn study of 
background and conditions. Parts of ''Farmer Bgssett's Ro- 
mance," with its analysis of the "pagan element" in New Eng- 
land character, are worthy of Mary E. Wilkins. The stories, 
however, belong with the old rather than the new, and have been 
forgotten. 



THE NEW ROMANCE 255 

It is impossible to understand ''H, H." without taking into 
account her New Englandism, She was a daughter of the 
Brahmins, in many ways a counterpart of Elizabeth Stuart 
Phelps — intensely conscientious, emotional, eager in the reform 
of abuses, brilliant, impetuous. While visiting California in 
the mid seventies she came in contact with the Indian problem 
and with characteristic impulsiveness set out to arouse the na- 
tion. After six months of intense work in the Lenox library 
of New York she published her Century of Dishonor, a bitter 
arraignment of the national Indian policy, and at her own ex- 
pense sent a copy to every member of Congress. As a result 
she was appointed one of two commissioners to examine and re- 
port upon "the condition and need of the Mission Indians of 
California." Her report was thorough and businesslike, but it 
accomplished little. 

Then she conceived the purpose of enlarging her area of ap- 
peal by the publication of a story — on the title page it stands 
Ramona. A Story. The problem preceded plot and materials 
and background. "You have never fully realized," she wrote 
only a few weeks before her death, "how for the last four years 
my whole heart has been full of the Indian cause — how I have 
felt, as the Quakers say, *a concern' to work for it. My Ce7i- 
tury of Dishonor and Ramona are the only things I have done of 
which I am glad now. ' ' ^ And earlier than that she had written : 
"I have for three or four years longed to write a story that 
should Heir on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do 
it; I knew I had no background — no local color. "•* 

Ramona was conceived of, therefore, as a tract, as a piece of 
propaganda, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Loveliness. It was 
written with passion, flaming hot from a woman's heart — not 
many have been the romances written in heat. In this one re- 
spect it may be likened to Mrs. Stowe's great work, but to call 
it, as so often it has been called, "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the 
Indian, " is to speak with inaptness. The book is a romance, and 
only a romance ; its whole appeal is the appeal of romance. She 
had found at last her background, but it was a background that 
dominated and destroyed her problem. Unconsciously she sur- 
rendered herself to the charm of it until to-day the book is no 

3 The Nation, August 20, 1885. 
iThe Atlantic Monthly, 86:713. 



256 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

more a problem novel than is the House of the Seven Gables, 
which also makes use of the excesses and crimes of a system. 

No background could be more fitted for romance: southern 
California with its "delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer"; 
the old Spanish regime, "half barbaric, half elegant, wholly 
generous and free handed," "when the laws of the Indies were 
still the law of the land, and its old name, 'New Spain,' was an 
ever-present link and stimulus";^ and over it all like a soft, 
old-world atmosphere the Romish church with its mystery and 
its medieval splendor. "It was a picturesque life, with more of 
sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, 
more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny 
shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still. ' ' ^ 

It had been the plan of the author first to elicit strongly the 
reader's sympathy for Ramona and the Indian Alessandro, then 
to harrow him with the persecutions wreaked upon them because 
they were Indians. But the purpose fails from the start. Ra- 
mona 's Indian blood is not convincing to the reader. Until the 
story is well under way no one of the characters except the 
Senora and the priest, not even Ramona herself, suspects that she 
is not a daughter of the old Spanish house of Ortegna. There 
was small trace of the Indian about her: her beauty was by no 
means Indian — steel blue eyes and ' ' just enough olive tint in her 
complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it 
swarthy." She had been reared as a member of the patriarchal 
household of the Morenos, and in education and habit of life 
was as much Spanish as her foster brother Felipe. And Ales- 
sandro — even the author explains that Ramona "looked at him 
with no thought of his being an Indian — a thought there had 
surely been no need of her having, since his skin was not a shade 
darker than Felipe's." He is an Indian, we must admit, and 
yet an Indian who looks like a Spaniard, an Indian who has been 
educated carefully in the Mission like a priest, an Indian who 
can sing Latin hymns with marvelous sweetness and play the 
violin like a master, an Indian with all the characteristics of a 
courtly seiior, more nobly Spanish in soul than even Felipe 
himself, the heir of the great Moreno estate — the imagination 
refuses to accept either of the two characters as Indians. Uncle 

5 Ramona, Chap. 11. 



THE NEW ROMANCE 257 

Tom's Cabin was worked out with the blackest of negroes; its 
central figure was a typical slave, who died at the end a victim 
of the system, but as one reads Ramona one thinks of Indians 
only as incidental figures in the background. 

It is a romance of the days of the passing of the haughty 
old Spanish regime. A maiden of inferior birth, or, in terms of 
the ordinary continental romance, a maiden whose mother was 
of the peasant class, is brought up side by side and on a perfect 
equality with the heir of the noble house. He falls in love with 
her, but he tells of his love neither to her nor to his proud Cas- 
tilian mother, who alone in the family knows the secret of the 
girl's birth. Then the maiden clandestinely marries, out of her 
caste as all but the Seiiora supposes, a peasant, as her mother 
had been a peasant, and is driven out of the home with harsh- 
ness. A tenderly reared maiden, married to poverty, forced 
to live for a period in squalor, bereaved at last of her husband, 
rescued by her old lover when she is at the lowest point of her 
misery, and taken back to the old home where the implacable 
mother has died, and there wooed until she surrenders her new 
future to the high-born foster brother, who, even though he has 
learned of her peasant strain, has never ceased to love her — that 
is the romance. The Indians, even Alessandro, are felt to be 
only incidental parts of the story. The center of the romance 
is the slow, faithful, thwarted, but finally triumphing, love of 
Felipe. The thing that really grips is not the incidental wrongs 
and sufferings of the Indians, but the relentlessly drawn picture 
of the old Seiiora and the last chapter where the two lovers, 
united at last, have left behind them the old land, no longer 
theirs — its deserted and melancholy Missions, its valleys and 
long pastures which ring now with the shouts of a conquering 
race, and turn their faces southward into a new world and a 
new and more joyous life. Then it was that Ramona blossomed 
into her full beauty. ''A loyal and loving heart indeed it was 
— loyal, loving, serene. Few husbands so blest as the Seiior 
Filipe Moreno. Sons and daughters came to bear his name. 
The daughters were all beautiful ; but the most beautiful of them 
all, and, it was said, the most beloved by both father and mother, 
was the eldest one: the one who bore the mother's name, and 
was only step-daughter to the Senor — Ramona, daughter of Ales- 
sandro the Indian." And so the romance ends, as romance 



258 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

should end, with all trouble and uncertainty a mere cloud in the 
far past. 

Ramona is a bombshell that all unknowingly to its creator 
turned out to be not a bombshell at all, but an exquisite work 
of art. The intensity and the passion, which came from the 
viewing of abuses and the desire to work reform, wove them- 
selves into the very substance of it. It is a blending of realism 
and romanticism and ethic earnestness into a rounded romance. 
More and more is it evident that aside from this and perhaps 
two or three sonnets, nothing else that its author wrote is of 
permanent value. Ramona, however, is alone enough to give 
her a place in American literature, a place indeed with the two 
or three best writers of American romance. 

Ill 

The French occupation of the northern area of the continent 
has also proved a rich literary field. It seems, as HoweUs has 
observed, that the French have touched America "with romance 
wherever they have touched it at all as soldiers, priests, exiles, 
or mere adventurers." The bare history of their adventures is, 
as Parkman has recorded it, romance. Cooper caught a glimpse 
of the richness of the field, and a grand-niece of his, Constance 
Fenimore Woolson, made a new discovery of it during the ' ' local 
color" period that followed the advent of Bret Harte. Her col- 
lection of stories, Castle Nowhere, 1875, pictured with graphic 
realism the life of the rude settlements along the upper lakes, but 
once or twice she dipped her pen into pure romance and became 
a pioneer. Her sketch, ' ' The Old Agency, ' ' which deals with the 
ancient building at Mackinac with its memories of the Jesuits, 
and her strong story "St. Clair Flats" reveal what she might 
have done had she not turned her attention to other regions. 

The field that she abandoned was taken later by Mary Hart- 
well Catherwood, a native of Ohio, the first woman novelist of 
the period to be born west of the Alleghenies. She was, more- 
over, the first woman of any prominence in American literary 
ranks to acquire a college education, graduating not in the East, 
as one might suppose, but from a new college in the new West. 
The fact is significant. After a brief period of teaching in Illi- 
nois, she became a newspaper writer and a general literary 
worker, and she published her first book, A Woman in Armor, 



THE NEW ROMANCE 259 

as early as 1875. Juveniles, marketable stories, sketches, crit- 
iques, flowed from her pen for nearly twenty years, and yet in 
1888 she had settled upon no fixed style or field of work and she 
was completely unknown to the reading public. She seems to 
have been trying the literary currents of the time. Her first 
experiment, not to mention her juveniles, was her Craqiie-0'- 
Doom, 1881, an E. P. Roe-like novel of the He Fell in Love with 
His Wife type, but it made no impression. * ' Don 't you know, ' ' 
she makes one of her characters say in words that are an ex- 
planation, "that the key of the times is not sentiment but prac- 
tical common sense? Just after the war when the country was 
wrought to a high pitch of nerves, current literature overflowed 
with self-sacrifice. According to that showing — and current lit- 
erature ought to be a good reflection of the times — everybody 
was running around trying to outdo his neighbor in the broken 
heart and self-renunciation business. ' ' Next she assayed to enter 
the "practical sense" school, and her "Serena," Atlantic, 1882, 
with its unsparingly realistic picture of a death and funeral in 
an Ohio farmhouse, shows that she might have made herself 
the Miss Jewett or the ]\Iiss Wilkins of her native region. But 
minute studies of contemporary life failed to satisfy the demands 
within her. She awoke at last to her true vocation over a volume 
of Parkman, let us suppose over the sixth and the sixteenth 
chaptei*s of The Old Regime in Canada. From the glowing 
pages of this master of narrative she caught a full breath of ro- 
mance and for the first time she realized her powers. 

The Romance of Dollard, which appeared in the Century in 
1888, and the other romances that swiftly followed, are no more 
like the earlier work of the author than if they had been written 
by another hand. It was as if a new and brilliant writer had 
suddenly appeared. The suddenness, however, was only a seem- 
ing suddenness: the romances were in reality the culmination 
of a long and careful period of apprenticeship. Her style, to be 
sure, had been influenced by Parkman: one cannot read a page 
without feeling that. There is the same incisive, nerv^ous man- 
ner ; the same impetuous rush and vigor as if the wild Northern 
winds were filling the paragraphs; the same short and breath- 
less sentences in descriptions of action, packed with excitement 
and dramatic force. Yet there is vastly more than Parkman in 
her work. There is a wealth of poetry and spiritual force in it, 



260 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

a healthy sentiment, a skilful selecting and blending of romantic 
elements, and a Hardy-like power to catch the spirit of a locality 
so as to make it almost a personality in the tragedy. This back- 
ground of wilderness, this monotone of the savage North, is never 
absent. At the beginning of every story and every chapter is 
struck, as it were, the dominating key. Here is the opening 
paragraph of ' ' The Windigo ' ' : 

The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie's River called the Sault could 
be heard at all hours through the settlement on the rising shore and 
into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, 
like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an in- 
clined channel until the trance of winter locked it up. At August dusk, 
when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the ga;shing mono- 
tone became very distinct. 

These rapids with their mournful cry become a character in the 
story; they dominate every page until at the end they rescue 
the hero, bearing in his arms the frightful "windigo," in a 
page of action that stirs the blood. The Canadian wilds of 
the coureurs de hois, the roar of swollen rivers, the sudden storms 
that lash the forests, the terror and the mystery of night in the 
savage woods, and evermore the river, the black St. Lawrence — 
one feels them like a presence. Like Cable, too, she can make 
her reader share the superstitious thrill of the region. Her 
windigos and loup-garous lay hold on one like a hand out of the 
dark. 

Amid this wild landscape a wild social order — savage Indians, 
explorers, voyageurs, flaming Jesuits, habitants, grands seigneurs, 
soldiers of fortune — Frontenac, Tonty, Dollard, La Salle, Bigot, 
Montcalm, and perhaps the lost dauphin, son of Louis XVI and 
Marie Antoinette— and in the heart of it all and the moving 
force of it all, beautiful women, exiles from France, exquisite 
maidens educated in convents, charmingly innocent, lithe Indian 
girls, Indian queens, robust daughters of habitants. Swords 
flash in duel and battle, love rules utterly even such stormy souls 
as La Salle's, plots with roots that extend even across the ocean 
into France are worked out in secret fastness — with such ma- 
terial and such background romantic combinations are endless. 

The strength of Mrs. Catherwood's work lies in its tensity 
and excitement, its vigor of narrative, its picturesque setting, 



THE NEW ROMANCE 261 

its power of characterization. From this very element of strength 
comes a weakness. Romance must tread ever near the verge of 
the impossible, and at times she pushes her situations too far 
and falls over into the realm of melodrama. In The White 
Islander, for instance, the Indians have the hero burning at the 
stake when suddenly Marie, the French "white islander" who 
loves him, leaps into the circle of flames, declaring that she will 
die with him. Then realizing there is no hope of saving the 
two, the Jesuit father unites them in marriage, side by side at 
the stake, while the flames are crackling, but the moment he 
pronounces them man and wife the yells of the rescuing party 
resound from the near forest and they are saved. 

There is another weakness, one that lies far deeper, one indeed 
that applies to the whole school of historical novelists that so 
flourished in the nineties. The author had a passion for "docu- 
menting" her romances. She studied her sources as carefully as 
if she were to write a history ; she used all the known facts that 
could be found; then she supplemented these known facts copi- 
ously from her imagination. For her Romance of Dollard she 
got Parkman to write an introduction commending its historical 
accuracy ; she s-trewed the chapters with corroborating footnotes ; 
and she tried in all ways to give the impression that it was a 
genuine piece of history. But there is no evidence that Dollard 
ever married, and there is not a scrap even of tradition that his 
bride died with him at the battle of the Long Saut. To make an 
historical personage like Dollard or La Salle or Tonty the lead- 
ing, speaking character in a romance is to falsify the facts. His- 
torical romance is not history ; it is pure fiction, true only to tlie 
spirit of the age and the place represented and to the funda- 
mentals of human character and the ways of the human soul. It 
should be worked out always with non-historical characters. 

Of Mrs. Catherwood's romances the best is The Lady of Fort 
St. John, made so perhaps on account of the unique character 
Rossignol. Her strongest work, however, lies in her shorter 
stories. It was a peculiarity of the whole period that nearly 
all of its writers of fiction should have been restricted in their 
powers of creation to the small effort rather than to the large. 
It was the age of cameos rather than canvases. Her volume, 
The Chase of St. Castm and Other Stories of the French in the 
New World, and her Mackinac and Lake Stories, which deal with 



262 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

the mixed populations dwelling on the islands of the Great 
Lakes, show her at her highest level. Her versatility, however, 
was remarkable. Her Spirit of an Illinois Town, a realistic 
story of a typical boom town, has in it the very soul of the new 
West, and her The Days of Jeanne d'Arc, written after much 
observation of the Vosges and Lorraine peasants in France and 
a year of work in the best libraries, is as brilliant a piece of his- 
torical work as was produced during the period. 

Wliatever her failings as a romancer she must be reckoned 
with always as perhaps the earliest American pioneer of that 
later school of historical fiction writers that so flourished in the 
nineties. After her stirring tales had appeared, Alice of Old 
Vincennes, and Monsieur Beaucaire, and The Seats of the 
Mighty, and all the others, were foregone conclusions. 

IV 

The latest field in America for romance was that created by 
the Civil War. The patriarchal life of the great Southern 
plantations had in it a peculiar picturesqueness, especially when 
viewed through the fading smoke of the conflict that destroyed it. 
An old aristocracy had been overthrown by Northern invaders — 
field enough for romance. It had been a peculiar aristocracy — a 
"democratic aristocracy," as it was fond of explaining itself, 
"not of blood but of influence and of influence exerted among 
equals, ' ' ^ but none the less it was an aristocracy in the heart of 
democratic America, Roman in its patrician pride, its jealously 
guarded principle of caste, its lavish wealth, and its slavery 
centered, social regime. Like all aristocracies it was small in 
numbers. "Only about 10,731 families held as many as fifty 
or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be 
taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates 
of the South." ^ But of these estates very many were only com- 
mercial establishments with little social significance. The real 
aristocracy was to be found in a few old families, notably in Vir- 
ginia, in numbers not exceeding the New England aristocracy of 
the Brahmins, which had been set apart by a principle so 
radically different. Both were narrowly provincial rather than 
national, both were centered within themselves, both were intol- 

6 WoodroAST Wilson, Division and Reunion, 106. 
t F. E. Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, 32. 



THE NEW ROMANCE 263 

erant and self-satisfied, and both alike disappeared in the flames 
of the war to make way for the new national spirit which was to 
rule the new age. 

To feel the atmosphere of this Southern old regime, this ex- 
clusive aristocracy, far older than the republic, one must read 
Thomas Nelson Page's The Old South, or his earliest published 
sketch, "Old Yorktown," Scribner's Monthly, 1881, a sketch 
that is in reality the preface to his romances. It may be profit- 
able, perhaps, to quote a few paragraphs. After his description 
of the old custom house of York, the first erected in America, he 
writes : 

There the young bucks in velvet and ruffles gathered to talk over the 
news or plan new plots of surprising a governor or a lady-love. It 
was there the haughty young aristocrats, as they took snuff or fondled 
their hounds, probably laughed over the story of how that young fellow, 
Washington, who, because he had acquired some little reputation fight- 
ing Indians, had thought himself good enough for anybody, had courted 
Mary Gary, and very properly had been asked out of the house of the 
old Colonel, on the ground that his daughter had been accustomed to 
ride in her own coach. ... It would be difficult to find a fitter illus- 
tration of the old colonial Virginia life than that which this Httle town 
affords. It was a typical Old Dominion borough, and was one of the 
eight boroughs into which Virginia was originally divided. One or t\yo 
families owned the place, ruling with a sway despotic in fact, though in 
the main temperate and just, for the lower orders were too dependent 
and inert to dream of thwarting the "gentlefolk," and the southerner 
uncrossed was ever the most amiable of men. 

Among these ruling families were the Nelsons and the Pages : 

The founder of the Page family in Virginia was "Colonel John 
Page," who, thinking that a principality in Utopia might prove better 
than an acre in Middlesex, where he resided, came over in 1050. He 
had an eye for "bottom land," and left his son Matthew an immense 
landed estate, which he dutifully increased by marrying Maiy Mann, 
the rich heiress of Timber Neck. Their son, Mann, was a lad thirteen 
years old Avhen his father died. After being sent to Eton, he came 
back and took his place at the "Council Board," as his fathers did be- 
fore him and as his descendants did after him. 

It reminds one of Hawthorne's account of his o\^ti family in the 
introduction to The Scarlet Letter. 

Before the war the South had had its romancers. Kennedy 
and Simms and others had tried early to do for it what Cooper 
had done for the more northerly area. Then in the fifties John 



264 AMEEICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Esten Cooke (1830-1886), the best novelist the South produced 
during the earlier period, put forth a series of Virginia romances, 
the strongest of which undoubtedly was The Virginia Comedians, 
1854, republished in 1883. The strength of the book, as indeed 
of all of Cooke 's romances, lay in its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its 
stirring pictures of the more picturesque elements of the old 
Southern life: barbecues, horse races, contests between fiddlers, 
the doings of negroes, and the like. Its weakness, in addition to 
hasty workmanship and lack of cumulative power, was the com- 
mon weakness of all the mid-century fiction. It had a St. Elmo 
atmosphere. Like all the rest of his fiction, it is tainted with 
profuse sentimentality, with sensationalism, with a straining 
for the unexpected and the picturesque. Panels in the wall slide 
apart mysteriously, accidents happen in the nick of time, villains 
in the form of French dancing masters are foiled at last by the 
hero. One is in old Williamsburg, to be sure, "the Southern 
Boston" in its golden prime, and is impressed with its courtly 
manners, its beautiful women, its chivalrous heroes, its frequent 
duels ; yet one is never quite sure whether it is the real South or 
whether it is not after all the story-world of an old-fashioned 
romancer who perhaps has never visited the South at all save in 
imagination. It is romanticism Overdone; it is everything too 
much. Even its sprightliness and its occasional touches of real- 
ism cannot rescue it from oblivion. 

A dwelling upon the merely quaint and unusual in the local 
environment to arouse laughter and interest was perhaps the lead- 
ing source of failure in Southern fiction even to the time of the 
later seventies. From the days of Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, 
pictures there had been of the "cracker," the mountaineer, the 
Pike, the conventional negro of the Jim Crow and the Zip Coon 
or the Uncle Tom type, the colonel of the fire-eating, whisky- 
drinking variety, but there had been no painstaking picture of 
real Southern life drawn with loving hand, not for mirth and 
wonder, not for the pointing of a moral, but for sympathy and 
comprehension. Horace E. Scudder as late as 1880 noted that 
''the South is still a foreign land to the North, and travelers are 
likely to bring back from it only what does not grow in the 
North." 8 It was true also of travelers in its books as well, for 

s Atlantic Monthly, 46:828. 



THE NEW ROMANCE 265 

the most of its books had been written for Northern publication. 
The first writer really to picture the South from the heart out- 
ward, to show it not as a picturesque spectacle but as a quivering 

section of human life, was Thomas Nelson Page (1853 ), 

whose first distinctive story, "Marse Chan," appeared as late 
as 1884. 

At the opening of the Civil "War Page was eight years old. 
During the years of conflict his home, one of the great planta- 
tions of Virginia, was a center of Confederate activities, and 
time and again the region about it was overrun by the invading 
armies. It was a marvelous training for the future novelist. He 
had been born at precisely the right moment. He had been a 
part of the old regime during the early impressionable years that 
are golden in a life, the years that color and direct the imagina- 
tion in all its future workings, and he was young enough when 
the era closed to adapt himself to the new order. At the close 
of the war he studied the classics with his father, a scholar of 
the old Southern type, took the course in the Virginia university 
presided over by Robert E. Lee, studied law at the University 
of Virginia, and then from 1875 to 1893 practised law in Rich- 
mond. These are the essentials of his biography. 

It was while he was establishing himself in his profession at 
the old capital of the Confederacy^ that he did his first literary 
work. Scribner's Monthly had heard from the ruined South 
the first murmurings of a new literature and was giving it every 
encouragement. It had published King's series of articles on The 
Great South, it had discovered Cable in 1873, it had encouraged 
Lanier, and in January, 1876, it had begun to issue a series of 
negro dialect poems by Irwin Russell, a native of Port Gibson, 
JMississippi, poems that undoubtedly had been suggested by the 
Pike balladry, and yet were so fresh and original in material and 
manner that they in turn became a strong influence on their times. 
That the poems launched Page in his literary career he has 
freely admitted. 

Personally I owe much to him. It was the H?:ht of his genius shining 
through his dialect poems— fii-st of dialect poems then and still first— 
that led my feet in the direction I have since tried to follow. Had he 
but lived, we should have had proof of what might be done with tnie 
negro dialect ; the complement of "Uncle Remus." » 

* The Southern Poets. Weber, xxv. 



266 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

In April, 1877, came his first contribution to Scrihner's, 
"Uncle Gabe's White Folks," a dialect poem of the Russell 
order, yet one that strikes the keynote of all its author's later 
work: 

Fine ole place? Yes, sah, 'tis so; 

An' mighty fine people my white folks war — 
But you ought ter 'a' seen it years ago, 

When de Marster an' de Mistis lived up dyah ; 
When de niggers 'd stan' all roun' de do', 
Like grains o' com on de cornhouse flo'. 

Together with Armistead C. Gordon of Staunton, Virginia, he 
wrote other ballads and poetical studies which were issued as a 
joint volume a decade later with the title Befo' de War, Echoes 
in Negro Dialect. But in the meantime he had been experi- 
menting with prose dialect, and late in the seventies he submitted 
to the magazine a long story told wholly in the negro vernacular. 
It was a bold venture: even Scribner's hesitated. They might 
print humorous dialect poems and Macon's "Aphorisms from 
the Quarters" in their "Bric-a-Brac" department, but a serious 
story all of it in a dialect that changed many words almost be- 
yond recognition — they held it for over four years. When 
it did appear, however, as "Marse Chan" in 1884, it seemed 
that their fears had been groundless. It was everywhere hailed 
as a masterpiece. ' ' Unc ' Edinburg 's Drowndin ', ' ' " Meh Lady, ' ' 
and others quickly followed, and in 1887 the series was issued 
as a collection with the title In Ole Virginia, a book that is to 
Page what The Luck of Roaring Camp is to Harte and Old 
Creole Days is to Cable. 

The method of Page in these early stories was original. The 
phrase "befo' de war" explains it. He would reproduce the 
atmosphere of the old South, or what is more nearly the truth, 
the atmosphere of aristocratic old Virginia plantation life. "No 
doubt the phrase 'Before the war' is at times somewhat abused. 
It is just possible that there is a certain Caleb Balderstonism in 
the speech at times. But for those who knew the old county 
as it was then, and contrast it with what it has become since, no 
wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower 
'before the war' than it is now. For one thing, the moonlight 
as well as the sunlight shines brighter in our youth than in ma- 



THE NEW ROMANCE 267 

turer age." *•* But Page expressed the phrase in negro dialect — 
"befo' de war." The story of the vanished era, the gallantry 
and spirit of its men, the beauty of its women, the nameless glow 
that hovers over remembered youthful days, he would show 
through the medium of the negro. It is exquisite art done with 
seemingly impossible materials. An old slave tells the story in 
his own picturesque way and wholly from his own viewpoint, yet 
so simply, so inevitably, that one forgets the art and surrenders 
oneself as one surrenders to actual life with its humor and its 
pathos and its tragedy. It is romance — an idealized world, and 
an idealized negro. Surely no freed slave ever told a consecu- 
tive tale like that, perfect in its proportions and faultless in its 
lights and shadows, yet such a criticism never for a moment 
occurs to the reader. The illusion is complete. The old South 
lives again and we are in it both in sympathy and comprehen- 
sion. 

In the decade that followed this first book Page gave himself to 
the writing of short stories and studies of Southern life, but 
only once or twice did he catch again the magic atmosphere of 
the earlier tales. Two Little Confederates is exquisite work, but 
Elsket, which followed, was full of inferior elements. Its negro 
stories, ''George Washington's Last Duel" and "P'laski's Tuna- 
ment," are only good vaudeville — they show but the surface of 
negro life; "Run to Seed" is pitched almost with shrillness, and 
"Elsket" and "A Soldier of the Empire," the one dealing with 
the last of her race, the other with the last of his order, are 
European sketches a trifle theatrical in spite of their touches 
of pathos. 

Red Rock (1898) marks the beginning of Page's second period, 
the period of long romances. Once before with On Newfound 
River he had tried the border canvas and he had failed save 
in certain of his characterizations and detached episodes. Now 
with Red Rock he set out to write what should stand among his 
works as The Grandissimes stands among Cable's. Its sub-title, 
A Chronicle of Reconstruction, explains at once its strength and 
its weakness. Its author approached it as IMrs. Jackson had 
approached Ramona, with a purpose, and, unlike ]\Irs. Jackson, 
he accomplished his purpose. The wrongs of the South during 
the period are made vivid, but at the expense of the novel. 

10 Preface to Red Rock. 



268 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The opening pages are perfect. Chapter two with its merry- 
making at the great plantation, and all its glimpses of traits 
and scenes peculiarly Southern, leads the reader to feel that 
he has in his hands at last the great romance of Southern life. 
There is the background of an ancient wrong. The red stain 
on the great rock is supposed to be the blood of the first mistress 
of the plantation murdered there by an Indian ; and the haunting 
picture over the fireplace of the first master who had killed the 
Indian with his bare hands, then had glared from his portrait 
until he had become the dominating center of the plantation, is 
felt to be the dominating center also of the romance as the Bras 
Coupe episode is the motif of The Grandissimes. But one is 
soon disappointed. The problem dominates the romance; the 
book is primarily a treatise, a bit of special pleading. It is un- 
doubtedly all true, but one set out to read a romance of the old 
South. True as its facts may be, from the art side it is full of 
weaknesses. Leech, the carpet-bagger, and Still, the rascally 
overseer, are villains of the melodramatic type; they are a dead 
black in character from first to last. The turning points of 
the action are accidents, the atmosphere is too often that of 
St. Elmo. When the master is killed in battle the picture of 
the Indian killer falls to the hearth, and again when Leech is 
beating to death the wounded heir to the estate it falls upon the 
assassin as if in vengeance and nearly crushes him. The plot is 
chaotic. We are led to believe that Blair Cary, the doctor's 
daughter, who in the opening chapters is as charming as even 
Polly herself in In Ole Virginia, is to be the central figure, but 
Blair is abandoned for no real reason and Miss Welsh, a North- 
ern girl, finishes the tale. Jacquelin, too, who dominates the 
earlier pages, peters out, and it is not clear why Middleton, the 
Northern soldier, is brought in near the close of the book, per- 
haps to marry Blair, who by every right of romance belongs to 
Jacquelin. It is enough to say that the story is weak just 
as Gabriel Conroy is weak, just as The Grandissimes and Pem- 
broke are weak. The materials are better than the construc- 
tion. 

The fame of Page then must stand or fall, as Harte's must, or 
Cable's or Miss Wilkins's, on the strength of his first book His 
essays on the Old South and other volumes are charming and 
valuable studies, his novels are documents in the history of a 



THE NEW ROMANCE 269 

stirring era, but his In Ole Virginia is a work of art, one of the 
real classics of American literature. 

Several others have used Virginia as a background for ro- 
mance, notably Mary Virginia Terhune, (1831 ), who wrote 

under the pseudonym "Marion Harland" something like twenty 
novels, the most of them in the manner in vogue before 1870, and 
F. Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915), whose Colonel Carter of Car- 
ter sville (1891) is one of the most sympathetic studies of South- 
ern life ever written. Its sly humor, its negro dialect, its power 
of characterization, its tender sentiment, its lovable, whimsical 
central figure, and its glimpses of an old South that has forever 
disappeared, make it one of the few books of the period concern- 
ing which one may even now prophesy with confidence. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

George W. Cable. Old Creole Days, 1879; The Grandissimes, 1880; 
Madame Delphine, 1881; The Creoles of Louisiana, 1884; Dr. Sevier, 
1885; The Silent South, 1885; Bonaventure, 1888; Strange True Stories 
of Louisiana, 1889; The Negro Question, 1890; The Busy Man's Bible, 
1891; John March, Southerner, 1894; Strong Hearts, 1899; The Cavalier, 
1901; Byelow Hill, 1902; Kincaid's Battery, 1908; Gideon's Band, 1914; 
The Amateur Garden, 1914. 

Helen Hunt Jackson. Verses, 1870, 1874; Bits of Travel, 1872; Saxe 
Holm Stories, 1873; Bits of Talk About Home Matters, 1873; Bits of 
Talk for Young People, 1876; Me7-cy Philbrick's Choice (No Name Series), 
1876; Hetty's Strange History (No Name Series), 1877; Bits of Travel 
at Home, 1878; Nelly's Silver Mine, 1878; Saa;e Holm Stories (Second 
Series), 1878; The Story of Boon (a Poem), 1879; A Century of Dis- 
honor, 1881; Mammy Tittleback and Her Family, 1881; The Training of 
Children, 1882; The Hunter Cats of Connorloa, 1884; Ramona [First 
Published in the Christian Union], 1884; Zeph, 1886; Glimpses of Three 
Coasts, 1886; Sonnets and Lyrics, 1886; Between Whiles, 1887. 

]Mary Haktwell Cathebwood. a Woman in Armor, 1875; Craque-0*- 
Doom, 1881; Rocky Fork, 1882; Old Caravan Days, 1884; The Secrets of 
Roseladies, 1888; The Romance of Dollard, 1889; The Story of Tonty, 
1890; The Lady of Fort St. John, 1891; Old Kaskaskia, The White 
Islander, 1893; The Chase of St. Castin, 1894; The Spirit of an Illinois 
Town, Little Renault, The Days of Jeanne d'Arc, 1897; Heroes of the 
Middle West, 1898; Spanish Peggy, 1899; The Queen of the Swamp, 1899; 
Lazarre, 1901. 

John Esten Cooke. Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John 
Myers and His Times, 1854; The Virginia Comedians; or Old Days in 
the Old Dominion, 1854; The Youth of Jefferson, 1854; Ellie; or, The 
Human Comedy, 1855; The Last of the Foresters, 1856; Henry St. John, 
Gentleman: a Tale of 187^-75, 1859; A Life of Stonewall Jackson, 1863; 



270 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Stonewall Jackson: a Military Biography, 1866; Surrey of Eagle's Nest, 
1866; The Wearing of the Oray, 1867; Mohun; or the Last Days of Lee 
and His Paladins, 1868; Fairfax, the Maker of Greenicay Court, 1868; 
Hilt to Hilt, 1869; Out of the Foam, 1869; Hammer and Rapier, 1870; 
The Heir to Gaymount, 1870; A Life of General R. E. Lee, 1871; Dr. 
Vandyke, 1872; Her Majesty the Queen, 1873; Pretty Mrs. Gaston, and 
Other Stories, 1874; Justin Hartley, 1874; Canolles : the Fortunes of a 
Partisan of '81, 1877; Professor Presseusee, Materialist and Inventor, 1878; 
Mr. Grantley's Idea, 1879; Stories of the Old Dominion, 1879; The Vir- 
ginia Bohemians, 1880; Virginia, 1885; The Maurice Mystery, 1885; My 
Lady Pokahontas, 1885. 

Thomas Nelson Page. In Ole Virginia, 1887; Two Little Confed- 
erates, Befo' de War, 1888; Elsket and Other Stories, On Newfound River, 
The Old South, Among the Camps, 1891 ; Pastime Stories, The Burial 
of the Guns, 1894; Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War, The Old 
Gentleman of the Black Stock, 1896; Two Prisoners, 1897; Red Rock, 
a Chronicle of Reconstruction, 1898; Santa Claus's Partner, 1899; A 
Captured Santa Claus, 1902; Gordon Keith, 1903; The Negro: the South- 
erner's Problem, 1904; Bred in the Bone, 1905; The Coast of Bohemia 
[poems], 1906; Novels, Stories, Sketches, and Poems. Plantation Edition. 
12 volumes, 1906; Under the Crust, 1907; The Old Dominion— Her Mak- 
ing and Her Manners, Robert E. Lee, the Southerner, Tommy Trot's Visit 
to Santa Claus, 1908; John Marvel, Assistant, 1909; Robert E. Lee, Man 
and Soldier, 1912; The Land of the Spirit, 1913. 



CHAPTER XIII 

LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 

The year 1866 saw the low-water mark, perhaps, not only of 
the American novel, but of American literature generally. On 
May 12 of this year The Round Table of New York, in an edi- 
torial entitled "Plain Talk with American Writers," declared 
that "The literary field was never so barren, never so utterly 
without hope of life. . . . The era of genius and vigor that 
seemed ready to burst on us only a few months ago has not been 
fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not 
seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old." Then it 
issued a challenge to the new generation of literary men : ' ' We 
have very little strong, original writing. Who will awaken us 
from this sleep? Who will first show us the first signs of a 
genuine literary reviving? ... If ever there was a time when a 
magnificent field opened for young aspirants for literary renown, 
that time is the present. Every door is wide open." 

We know now that the reviving was close at hand. Within five 
years the flood-gates were opened, and Clemens, Harte, Ilay, 
Burroughs, Howells, IMiller, and all the group were publishing 
their first work. Among others a young Georgia school-teacher 
felt the thrill as he read the Round Table call, and he made haste 
to send to the paper a budget of poems — "Barnacles," "Laugh- 
ter in the Senate," and some others, to be, if possible, the first 
fruits of this new period. A year later, in 1867, he went himself 
to New York to bring out a novel. Tiger Lilies, a book sent forth 
with eagerness and infinite hope, for was not every door wide 
open ? It is a book to linger over : crude as it is, it was the first 
real voice from the new South. 

I 
The little group of Southern poets that had gathered itself 
about Paul Hamilton Hayne (1831-1886), the chief of whom 

271 



272 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

were Margaret Junkin Preston (1820-1897), Francis Orrery 
Ticknor (1822-1874), and Henry Timrod (1829-1867)— poets 
who were contemporary with Bayard Taylor and his group — be- 
longs rather with the period before the war than with the new 
national period that followed it. They were poets of beauty like 
Stoddard, singing the music of Keats and Tennyson and the old 
Cavalier poets — dreamers, makers of dainty conceits and pretty 
similes, full of grace and often of real melody, but with little 
originality either of manner or message. The war came into their 
lives sharply and suddenly, a cataclysm that shook all their plans 
into ruins about them. It swept away their property, their 
homes, their libraries, even their health. For a time during the 
conflict they turned their poetry into martial channels: invec- 
tives on the invading "Huns," rallying songs, battle lyrics, 
patriotic calls. When the war was over they found themselves 
powerless to adjust themselves. Hayne before the war was a 
graceful sonneteer, a worshiper of classic beauty, a writer of 
odes, not to the nightingale but to the mocking bird : 

A golden pallor of voluptuous light 

Filled the warm southern night : 

The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene 

Moved like a stately queen, 

So rife with conscious beauty all the while. 

What could she do but smile 

At her own perfect loveliness below, 

Glassed in the tranquil flow 

Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams'? 

Even his war poems are gentle and softly poetic. After the war 
he lapsed into lyrics of retrospect and contemplation with a 
minor note always of gentle resignation. He lived to write 
elegies on Timrod and Lanier and to make himself the threnodist 
of the old South : 

Forgotten ! Tho' a thousand years should pass, 
Methinks our air will throb with memory's thrills, 

A common grief weigh down the faltering grass, 
A pathos shroud the hills; 

Waves roll lamenting; autumn sunsets yearn 

For the old time's return, 

A more sensitively imaginative poet was Timrod, yet even he 
was not strong enough to lead his time and become more than 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 273 

a minor singer. He was of the old South and would have been 
wholly out of place in the new even had he lived. More fire and 
Hebraic rage there were in him than in Hayne, indeed than in 
any other American poet save Whittier. Once or twice when his 
life was shaken to the center by the brutalities of war he burst 
into cries that still quiver with passion : 

Oh! standing on this desecrated mold, 

Methinks that I behold, 

Lifting her bloody daisies up to God, 

Spring kneeling on the sod. 

And calling with the voice of all her rills, 

Upon the ancient hills 

To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves 

That tuni her meads to graves. 

And again at the climax of "The Cotton Boll": 

Oh, help us, Lord ! to roll the crimson flood 
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing 
Northward, strike with us ! till the Goth shall cling 
To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave 
Mercy ; and we shall grant it, and dictate 
The lenient future of his fate 

There, where some rotting ships and crumblmg quays 
Shall one day mark the port which ruled the Western 
seas. 

And what other poet save Whittier could after victory burst into 
Hebraic ecstasy of joy like this? 

Our foes are fallen ! Flash, ye wires ! 

The mighty tidings far and nigh! 

Ye cities! write them on the sky 
In purple and in emerald fires! 

They came with many a haughty boast ; 

Their threats were heard on every breeze; 

They darkened half the neighboring seas; 
And swooped like vultures on the coast. 

False recreants in all knightly strife, 
Their way was wet with woman's tears; 
Behind them flamed the toil of years. 

And bloodshed stained the sheaves of life. 

They fought as tyrants fight, or slaves; 

God gave the dastards to our hands ; 

Their bones are bleaching on the sands. 
Or moldering slow in shallow graves. 



274 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

But it was like pouring molten bullet lead from Satsuma vase. 
The fragile, beautiful life that should have known nothing harsher 
than the music of poets and the laughter of children and lovers, 
broke under the strain of war and poverty and neglect, and his 
life went out miserably at thirty-eight. 

II 

Sidney Lanier's life was as brief as Timrod's and as full of 
harshness and poverty, but the end of the war found him young 
enough to have resiliency and the ability to adapt himself to the 
new regime of which willy-nilly he found himself a part. He 
was thirteen years younger than Timrod and twelve years younger 
than Hayne. His temperament was different : he was broader in 
his sympathies — no man ever threw himself more completely into 
the cause of the Confederacy, yet a decade after the war we find 
him with a nation-wide vision of the new era ; he was more demo- 
cratic of soul than Hayne or Timrod — he could worship beauty 
as passionately as they and he could also write ballads of the 
Pike County order; he suffered just as acutely from the war as 
did Timrod, yet one may search long through his poems or his 
letters for a single despondent note. He was buoyant and im- 
petuous : his wanning of literary recognition in the face of phys- 
ical disabilities seemingly insuperable places him beside Parkman. 

In point of time Lanier was the first of what may be called 
the Georgia school of writers. It is notable that the State most 
harshly dealt with by the war was the first to arise from its ruins, 
the first to receive the vision of a new South, and the first to 
catch the new national spirit. Macon, Lanier's birthplace, had 
about it all the best elements of the Old South. It was the seat 
of an influential college for women, it possessed a cultured society, 
and it had an art atmosphere — music, poetiy, literary conversa- 
tion — unusual in that period outside of New England and some 
of the larger cities. Lanier's home was in every way ideal: his 
father, a lawyer of the old Southern type, was "a, man of con- 
siderable literary acquirements and exquisite taste," and, more- 
over, like most Southerners of his class, he had a library stocked 
with the older classics, a treasure-house of which his son, bookish 
from his earliest childhood, made the fullest use. ''Sir Walter 
Scott, the romances of Froissart, the adventures of Gil Bias," 
all the older poets — he read them until he seemed to his boyish 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 275 

companions as one who lived apart in a different world from 
theirs. 

His formal schooling was meager, yet at fifteen he was able to 
enter the sophomore class of Oglethorpe University, a small de- 
nominational college at Midway, Georgia, and in 1860 he was 
ready for graduation with the highest honors of his class. Com- 
pared with the larger Northern institutions, the college was piti- 
fully primitive; Lanier in later years could even call it "far- 
cical," nevertheless it is doubtful if any university could have 
done more for the young poet. It brought him in contact with 
a man, James Woodrow of the department of science, a man who 
was to become later the president of the University of South Caro- 
lina and the author of the famous book, Aji Examination of Cer- 
tain Recent Assaults on Physical Science (1873). 

"Such a man," says his biographer, "coming into the life of Lanier 
at a formative period, influenced him profoundly. He set his mind 
going in the direction which he afterwards followed with great zest, 
the value of science in modem life and its relation to poetiy and re- 
ligion. He also revealed to him the meaning of genuine scholarship." ^ 

This influence it may have been which made Lanier in later years 
so tolerant and so broad of view. The attraction between pupil 
and teacher seems to have been mutual. Through Woodrow it 
was that Lanier received his appointment as tutor in the college, 
a position which he held during the year that followed. 

It was a year of close study and of wide reading. Throughout 
his undergraduate period he had read enormously: often in un- 
usual books: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jeremy Taylor, 
Keats 's Endymion, Chatterton, Christopher North, Tennyson, 
whose Maud he learned by heart, Carlyle, and a long list of others. 
"Without a doubt it was Carlyle who first enkindled in Lanier a 
love of German literature and a desire to know more of that 
language." He studied with eagerness. His dream now was to 
enter a German university and do scholarly work as Basil Gilder- 
sleeve had just done, and Thomas R. Price, two othi-r young men 
of the new South, but suddenly as he dreamed all his life plans 
fell in ruins about him. The crash of war resounded in his ears. 
All in a mon^ent he found himself in an atmosphere of fierce 
excitement. The college became an armed camp ; Macon became 

1 Sidney Lanier, Mims, 29. 



276 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

a military center. Before he had fairly realized it the young 
tutor, just turned twenty, had enlisted in the first company to 
leave the State, and was marching away to the front. 

His career as a soldier need not detain us. It was varied and 
it was four years long and it ended dramatically on the stormy 
night of November 2, 1864, when the Federal cruiser Santiago- 
de-Cuba picked up the blockade runner Lucy off Wilmington, 
North Carolina, and sent her crew, among them signal officer 
Lanier, to Point Lookout prison. A fellow prisoner and a close 
friend during the hard days that followed was another Southern 
poet, John Bannister Tabb (1845-1909), whose brief lyrics as we 
know them to-day possess beauty and finish and often distinction. 

Lanier was released in March, 1865, and after incredible hard- 
ships succeeded in reaching his home in Macon more dead than 
alive to find his mother dying of consumption. The poet 's tend- 
ency to the disease was congenital ; the prison hardships and ex- 
posure had broken down his physical vigor ; and two years later 
while teaching a small country school in Prattville, Alabama, as 
he was forced to do by the poverty of the South and his own lack 
of money or profession, hemorrhages from the lungs began, and 
the rest of his life, like Stevenson's under the same conditions, 
was a fight with tuberculosis, a perpetual changing from place 
to place that he might find some climate that would afford re- 
lief. With unparalleled heroism he fought off the disease for 
fifteen years, and under physical weakness that would have sent 
the average man to his bed and his grave he made himself 
recognized as the leading poetic voice of the new South, and one 
of the few poetic voices of his era. 

His life divides itself into three periods : the first one his time 
of dreaming, as he himself styled it — his boyhood, ending with 
the call to arms in 1861 ; the second his period of storm and stress, 
his period of struggle and uncertainty and final adjustment, end- 
ing in 1873 with his determination to devote his life to music and 
poetry ; and finally the seven or eight years in which eagerly and 
unremittingly, with failing health and long periods of total in- 
capacity, he wrote all those books and poems for which he is now 
known. 

Ill 

Lanier's work more than that of any other writer of his time 
illustrates the difference between the mid-century literature and 



LATER POETS OP THE SOUTH 277 

that of the later national period. He is distinctively a transition 
figure : he heard both voices and he obeyed both. Until after the 
war he was what Hayne and Timrod had been, and Taylor and 
Stoddard — a disciple of Keats, a poet of merely sensuous beauty. 
But for the war he would have been a Longfellow bringing from 
Germany Hyperions and Voices of the Night. The four vital 
years in the camps, on the blockade runner, in the military prison, 
with their close contact with life in its elemental conditions, was 
a university course far different from any that he had dreamed 
of in his college days. It was this that differentiates him from 
Hayne and Timrod and that brings him into our period. 

Tiger Lilies, his first published book (1867), is a document not 
only in the life of Lanier but also in the transition period of the 
sixties. It is a cnide first novel full of a strange mixture of weak- 
ness and strength. It has been likened to Longfellow's Hyperion, 
but the likeness extends no further than this : Tiger Lilies is the 
novel transitional to the seventies as Hyperion was transitional 
to the romantic thirties and forties. In parts it belongs completely 
to the older period. It opens with this outburst, not by Paul 
Fleming, but by Paul Riibetsahl : 

"Himmel ! Cospetto ! Cielo ! May our nests be built on the strong- 
est and leafiest bough of the great tree Ygdrasil! May they be lined 
with love, soft and warm, and may the storms be kind to them : Amen 
and Amen ! " said Paul Riibetsahl. 

The first part is florid in the extreme and artificial, full of lit- 
erary affectations and conceits : 

On the last day of September, 18G0, huntsman Dawn leapt out of 
the East, quickly ran to earth that old fox. Night, and sat down on the 
top of Smoky Mountain to draw breath, etc. 

Its discussions of poetry, of music, of the meaning of art and of 
life generally are all in the dream-world of Gorman romance, and 
its chaotic plot and its impossible characters and happenings are 
in full keeping. But with part two the book comes suddenly to 
life. The hero enters the war and all at once tliere is realism, 
passages like this as graphic even as Whitman : 

The wounded increase. Here is a musket in the road: there is the 
languid hand that dropped it, pressing its fingers over a bhie edged 
wound in the breast. Weary pressure, and vam— the blood flows 
steadil3^ 



278 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

More muskets, cartridge-boxes, belts, greasy haversacks, strew the 
ground. 

Here come the stretcher-bearers. They leave a drippmg line of 
blood. "Walk easy as you kin, boys," comes from the blanket which 
the men are carrying by the comers. Easy walking is desirable when 
each step of your four carriers spurts out the blood afresh or grates 
the rough edges of a shot bone in your leg. 

The sound of a thousand voices, eager, hoarse, fierce, all speaking 
together yet differently, comes through the leaves of the undergrowth. 
A strange multitudinous noise accompanies it — a noise like the tre- 
mendous sibilation of a mile-long wave just before it breaks. It is the 
shuffling of two thousand feet as they march over dead leaves. 

The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region 
that M^as to fi^re a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert 
Craddoek. The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Moun- 
tain — familiar names now — form the background, but the author 
puts no individuality into the landscape. It might be Germany. 
His mountaineers, however, are alive and they are sharply char- 
acterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain are among the 
earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically portrayed local 
types that soon was to figure so prominently in American litera- 
ture. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and his 
arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the 
best work of Charles Egbert Craddoek or Octave Thanet. The 
prison scenes, drawn from the author 's own first-hand experience, 
are documents in the history of the war. On every line is the 
stamp of reality. Here is a bivouac scene : 

Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly regarding 
his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet. 

"How do they come on, Cain'? Most done?" . . . 

"Bully ! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit." 

At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground ex- 
plodes in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and 
scattering havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the 
ruins and scrapes the dirt from his face. 

"Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful in- 
quiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?" 

In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, i 

sent from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 279 

who own many ; calling on these last for more sunshine and less 
night in their art. . . . There are those even here in the South 
who still love beautiful things with sincere passion." 

But necessity was upon the yoimg dreamer. He was without 
a profession, and he had married a wife. There was no refuge 
but his father 's profession, which always had been the last as well 
as the first resort of young Southerners. His father's law firm 
was glad to employ him, though it could offer but meager com- 
pensation. No more novels, no more dreams of the scholar's life, 
of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873 he was busy, like Cable 
during the same period, with his conveyances and his bills of sale. 
The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval France, "The 
Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that often 
he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it : 

May the maiden, 

Violet-laden 
Out of the violet eea, 

Comes and hovers 

Over lovers, 
Over thee, Marie, and me, 

Over me and thee. 

His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back 
of the definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he 
was still dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beau- 
tiful than at the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he 
was dreaming over his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the 
problems of his own time. He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's 
Private Argument," "Thar 's More in the Man than Thar Is in 
the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like, and published tliera 
in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia ' ' Crackers ' ' and 
with the social and financial conditions of the times, and they were 
written in 1868, two years before the Pike County balladry. In 
1875 with his brother Clifford he published in Scribucr's Monthly 
"The Power of Prayer ; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama," 
a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode 
recounted in ]\Iark Twain's The Gilded Age, yet original in tone 
and realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute 
it without hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to 
have been the first to discover the literary possibilities of the 



280 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

negro, at least in the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell 
is a stanza like this : 

It 'pear to me dis momin' I kin smell de fust o' June. 

I 'clar*, I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de liddle soon! 

Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon. 

But Russell 's first poem, ' ' Uncle Cap Interviewed, ' ' appeared in 
Scribner's almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed 
to the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's 
Baptist Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the 
negro as anything written later by Harris or Page : 

Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's ri^;, 

De sleepin'-time is pas' ; 
Wake up dem lazy Baptissis, 
Chorus. Dey 's mightily in de grass, grass, 

Dey 's mightily in de grass. 

De Meth'dis team's done hitched; fool, 

De day 's a-breakin' fas' ; 
Gear up dat lean old Baptis' mule, 

Dey 's mightily in de grass, grass, 

Dey 's mightily in de grass. Etc. 

Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field. 

IV 

The turning point came in 1873. The poet's physical condition 
had become so alarming that he had been sent to spend the winter 
at San Antonio, Texas. He found what least he was looking for. 
The German Maennerchor of the city, an unusual circle of musi- 
cians, discovered him and asked him to play to them the flute, 
an instrument that had been his companion since boyhood. ' ' To 
my utter astonishment, ' ' he wrote his wife, ' ' I was master of the 
instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou knowest I had 
never learned it; and thou remeinberest what a poor muddle I 
made at Marietta in plajdng difficult passages; and I certainly 
have not practised; and yet there I commanded and the blessed 
notes obeyed me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of ap- 
plause, Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my 
hand, and declared that he hat never heert de flude accompany 
itself pefore." - 

2 Mima's Sidney Lanier, 122. 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 281 

Judging from contemporary testimony, we are compelled to 
rate Lanier as a musical genius. Though he never had had 
formal training in the art, from his childhood music had been 
with him a consuming passion. He had taken his flute to the 
war, he had smuggled it into the prison, and he had moved all his 
life amid a chorus of exclamations over the magic beauty of his 
improvisations. The masters were praising him now: he would 
be a master himself. He would toil no longer at the task he 
despised; he would live now for art. In November, 1873, he 
wrote to his father : 

How can I settle myself down to be a third-rate strujrgling lawyer 
for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost 
absolute tha^ I can do something so much better? Several persons, 
from whose judgment in such mattei-s there can be no appeal, have 
told me, for instance, that I am the gTeatest flute-player in the world ; 
and several others, of equally authoritative judgment, have given me 
an almost equal encouragement to work with mj' pen. 'My dear father, 
think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through 
weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a 
farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business 
life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with 
literary people and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all 
these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could 
enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in 
my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you 
as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the 
devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long 
and so humbly, and through so much bitterness? ^ 

He gave himself first to music. So perfect was his mastery 
of his instrument that he secured without difficulty the position 
of first flute in Hamerik's Peabody Orchestra of Baltimore, and 
he played at times even with Thomas's Orchestra of New York. 
It was the opinion of Hamerik, himself a rare artist, that Lanier 
was a musician of highest distinction : 

His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, 
or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty 
out into the world. ... In his hands the flute no longer remained a 
mere material instnmient, but was transfonned into a voice that set 
heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, 
and a low sweetness of unspeakable ]>oetiT— His i>laying appealed 
alike to the musically leamed and to the unlearned— for he would 
mag-netize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the supe- 

^Quoiod bv William Hayes Ward, 1884, edition <>f tl;.- I'orms. 



282 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

riority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere 
technical scholarship. His art was not only the art of art, but an art 
above art. I will never forget the impression he made on me when he 
played the flute eoneerta of Emil Hartmau at a Peabody symphony 
concert, in 1878 — his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing 
noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audi- 
ence was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood 
the master, the genius.* 

His first recognition as a poet came in 1875 with the publication 
of "Corn" in Lippincott's Magazine. The poem caught the 
attention of Taylor and brought to the poet the commission to fur- 
nish the words for the Cantata to be sung at the Centennial Ex- 
position. After that commission Lanier was a national figure. 

During the scant six years that followed, the years of his lit- 
erary life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, 
he lived in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries 
to which he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he 
lay totally incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the 
speedy termination of all. Poetry he could write only in moments 
stolen from more imperative things. He compiled a guide book 
to Florida, he prepared courses of lectures on Shakespeare for 
clubs of women, he delivered two scholarly courses of lectures at 
Johns Hopkins University, and he published four juveniles that 
adapted for boys the old romances of chivalry. He wrote lyrics 
and songs, but his future as a poet must rest on five poems: 
"Corn," the first significant poem from the new South; "The 
Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the 
"West, ' ' which he intended should do for the centennial year what 
Taylor had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode ; 
"The Marshes of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; 
and, finally on his death bed, held in life only by his imperious 
will, "Sunrise," his most joyous and most inspired improvisation 
of all. 

V 

For Lanier was essentially an improvisators He left behind 
him no really finished work : he is a poet of magnificent fragments. 
He was too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry 
was a thing of rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses : his eager 
jottings for poems made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of 

' Quoted by William Hayes Ward, 1884, edition of the Poems. 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 283 

paper, anything that was at hand, fill a volume. He may be 
likened to a child in a meadow of daisies : he filled his hands, his 
arms, full of the marvelous things, then threw them aside to 
gather more and ever more. There was no time to arrange them, 
no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came in flocks ; he lived 
in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with excitement as do 
those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath been 
cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable 
deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I can- 
not tell you with what eagerness I devoured Felix Holt." "My 
heart was all a-cry," "The fury of creation is on me to-day." 
"Lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly 
bent and prostrate." "The very inner spirit and essence of all 
wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, 
sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath blown me in quick 
gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a sea of vast 
dreams. ' ' One may quote interminably. 

Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken 
as the key to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance 
the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and 
shifts of mere technical scholarship." It explains the uneven- 
ness of his work and its lack of finish. He had no patience to 
return to a poem and labor upon it. Other and more rapturous 
melodies were calling to him. It explains his lack of construc- 
tive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous glimpses, not of 
long, patient coordinating effort. His poems are chaotic in struc- 
ture even to the point often of obscurity. * ' Corn, ' ' for example, 
was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message 
doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the 
new South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection 
with the subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privi- 
leges of the poet soul. The message is not brought liome : one has 
to labor to find it. There is a succession of beautiful images ex- 
pressed often with rare melody and distinction, but inconsecutive 
even to vagueness. 

His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the 
English novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like 
a finished product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was 
to be a study of the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses 
he changes it into a study of the development of personality in 



284 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

literature, and finally ends it by devoting half his total space to 
a rhapsody upon George Eliot. The Science of English Verse has 
the same faults. He rides a pet theory through chapters and 
dismisses really basic principles with a paragraph. It is a book 
of magnificent, even at times of inspired sections, but as a com- 
plete treatise it has no great value. The same may be said of 
all his prose work : he had flashes of inspiration but no consecutive 
message. The cause for it was partly pathological, partly tem- 
peramental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an im- 
provisatore. 

That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner 
and more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was 
undoubtedly true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that 
stands high above its fellows : 

Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime 

That leads the vanward of his timid time 

Aud sings up cowards with commanding rime — 

Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow 

By double increment, above, below; 

Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, 

Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry. 

The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller 
in the clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand 
squarely on the earth : 

Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's, 
Yet ever piercest downward in the mold 

And keepest hold 
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth 

That gave thee birth. 

But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself 
is not often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia- 
minded and he had felt the national thrill that was making a new 
America, but it was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. 
"The Psalm of the West," which casts into poetic form certain 
vital episodes of American history, has no message. One searches 
it in vain for any interpretation of the soul of the great republic, 
or any forecasting of the future years, or any passages expressing 
what America is to stand for among the nations. It is a frag- 
ment, the introduction to what should have been the poem. 
. In "The Symphony" more than elsewhere, perhaps, he is the 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 285 

poet of his period. The poem is a cry against the materialism 
that Lanier felt was crushing the higher things out of American 
life: 

"0 Trade! 0, Trade! Would thou wert dead! 
The Time needs heart — 'tis tired of head: 
We're all for love," the violins said. 

Each instrument in the orchestra joins in the argument. "A 
velvet flute note" follovred the passion of the violins, the reeds 
whispered, ' ' the bold straightforward horn ' ' spoke out, 

And then the hautboy played and smiled 
And sang- like any large-eyed chUd. 

The solution of the problem was the same that Shelley had 
brought. Love alone could master the evils of the time : 

Life! Life! thou sea-fugne, writ from east to west. 
Love, love alone can pore 
On thy dissolving score 
Of harsh half-phrasings, 

Blotted ere writ, 
And double erasings 

Of chords most tit. 

And love was to come through music : 

Music is love in search of a word. 

The poem is indeed a symphony. One feels that the poet is com- 
posing rather than writing, that he is thinking in terms of or- 
chestration, balancing parts and instruments, and working out 
tone values. The same is true of "The Marshes of Glynn" and 
' ' Sunrise ' ' : they are symphonies. 

One must appreciate fully this musical basis of Lanier's art if 
one is to understand him. He thought in musical forms. The 
best illustration, perhaps, may be found in his Centennial Can- 
tata. To the average man the poem meant little. One must read 
it and reread it and study it if one is to get any consecutive 
thought from it. But read after Lanier's explanation, it be- 
comes not only clear but illuminating : 

The principal matter over which the United States can legritimately 
exult is its present existence as a Republic, in spite of so much oppo. 
sition from Nature and from man, I therefore made the refrain of 

the song about which all its train of thought moves — conceni itself 

wholly with the Fact of existence: the waves cry "It shall not be"; the 



286 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

powers of nature cry "It shall not be"; the wars, etc., utter the same 
cry. This Refrain is the key to the whole poem. 

A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades of 
meaning save those which are very intense, and very highly and sharply 
contrasted, led me to divide the poem into the eight paragraphs or 
movements which it presents, and make these vividly opposed to each 
other in sentiment. Thus the first movement is reflection, measured 
and sober: this suddenly changes into the agitato of the second: this 
agitato, culminating in the unison shout "No! It shall not he," yields 
in the third movement to the pianissimo and meager effect of the 
skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc. : this pianiss-imo in the fourth 
movement is turned into a climax of the wars of armies and of faiths, 
again ending in the shout, "No !" etc. : the fifth movement opposes this 
with a whispered chorus — Huguenots whispering Tea, etc. : the sixth 
opposes again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc. : the seventh 
opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song; and the 
last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad full chorus of meas- 
ured and firm sentiment. 

The metrical fonns were selected purely with reference to their de- 
scriptive nature : the four trochaic feet of the opening strophe measure 
off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe swings and yaws like a 
ship, the next I made outre and bizarre and bony simply by the device 
of interposing the line of two and a half trochees amongst the four 
trochee lines: the swift action of the Huguenot strophe of course re- 
quired dactyls: and having thus kept the first part of the poem (which 
describes the time before we were a real nation) in meters which are 
as it were exotic to our tongvie, I now fall into the iambic meter — 
which is the genius of English words — as soon as the Nation becomes 
secure and firm. 

My business as member of the orchestra for three years having 
caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had often been 
struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly effects of that part 
of the bassoon register so well known to students of Berlioz and Meyer- 
beer — by the use of the syllable ee sung by a chorus. With this view 
I filled the ghostly Jamestown stanza with ee's and would have put 
in more if I could have found them appropriate to the sense.^ 

No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of 
Composition. ' ' It explains much of Lanier 's work. 

VI 

Had Lanier lived a decade longer, had he had time and strength 
to devote himself completely to his poetry, had his impetuous soul 
had time to gain patience and poise, and divest itself of florid ex- 
travagance and vague dithyramb, he might have gained a much 
higher place as a poet. He was gaining in power : his last poem 

^Letters of Sidney Lanier, 162. 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 287 

is his greatest. He was laying plans that would, we feel sure, 
have worked themselves out to high poetic achievement. For at 
least four books of poetry he had already selected titles : Hymns 
of the Mountains, Hymiis of the Marshes, Songs of Aldheim, and 
Poems on Agriculture. AVhat they were to be we can judge only 
from * ' The Marshes of Glynn ' ' and ' ' Sunrise. ' ' 

In these two poems we have work that is timeless and essentially 
placeless. There is a breadth and sweep about it that one finds 
only in the greater poets : 

And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting. 

Are beating 
The dark overhead as my heart beats — and steady and free 
Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea. 

Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? 

Somehow my soul seems suddenly free 

From the weighing of fate and the sad discussions of sin, 

By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn, 

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 

Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God: 

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies 

In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies: 

By so many roots as the marsh-gi-ass sends in the sod 

I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God : 

Oh, like the greatness of God is the gi-eatness wnthin 

The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glj'^nn. 

The jottings that he made in his notebooks and the fragments of 
poems that he noted down as the inspiration came to him remind 
us often of Whitman. They have sweep and range : 

I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled 
in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat 
like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the p-round, and 
I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage 
and I said : 

"I know that thou art the word of God, dear violet. 
And, oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads! 
Measure the space a violet stands above the ground, 
'T is no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do 
than that!" 

I went to the church to find my Lord. 
They said He is here. He lives here. 
But I could not see him 
For the creed-tables and bonnet flowers. 



288 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Lanier is essentially a poet of unfulfilled promise. He seems 
always about to do greater things than in reality he ever does. 
His lyrics like "Evening Song," and "The Trees and the 
Master" and "The Song of the Chattahoochee," have strains in 
them almost Shelley-like, but there is always the fatal defect some- 
where. Nothing is perfect. It seems strange sometimes that one 
who could at moments go so far could not go the whole way and 
remain long. He must hold his place among the American poets 
by virtue of a few fragments. A few times was he rapt into the 
pure ether of poetry, but he was allowed to catch only fleeting 
glimpses. 

VII 

The period may be said to have produced in the South two in- 
spired poets, Lanier and Irwin Russell, and in many ways the two 
were alike. Both were frail of body and sensitive of tempera- 
ment, both were passionately given to music and found their 
poetic field by means of it, both were educated men, eager students 
of the older literatures, both discovered the negro as poetic ma- 
terial, and both died when their work was just beginning, Russell, 
like Keats, at the boyish age of twenty-six. But Russell added 
what Lanier had no trace of, a waywardness of character and a 
genius for goodfellowship that wrecked him even earlier than it 
did Bums. 

The life of Russell is associated with four cities : Port Gibson, 
Mississippi, where he was born in 1853 ; St. Louis, where he spent 
the earlier years of his life and where later he completed the 
course at the Jesuit University; Port Gibson again, where he 
studied law and was admitted to the bar; New York City, of 
which he was a resident from January until July, 1879 ; and New 
Orleans, where he died in December of the same year. His life 
was fitful and restless. He did little with his profession, turning 
from it to learn the printer's trade, and then after a few listless 
months, drifting into other things. He had dreams of California 
and wandered on foot in its direction as far as Texas; he at- 
tempted to run away to sea, and he spent much time on the river 
boats making jovial friends of the captains and the pilots. His 
banjo assured him of a welcome wherever he might go. 

The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. 
He composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 289 

revised, and he eared little for the finished product save as it 
might please his friends. One finds many evidences in his work 
that he learned his art from Burns, whom he considered the great- 
est poet the world had ever produced. He had saturated himself 
too with the English balladists and the genuine old poets of the 
early periods. The poetry of his own time angered him. In ' ' The 
Hysteriad" {Scribner's, 16:759) he satirizes with bitterness the 
contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he said, "or a 
periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional, and is 
not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry 
meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay 
very close to the life of every day, something redolent of hu- 
manity, like Burns 's songs. He maintained that his own inspira- 
tion had come not at all from other poets, but from actual contact 
with the material that he made use of. His own words concerning 
the composition of his first poem have a peculiar value. They are 
a part of the history of the period : 

You know I am something of a banjoist. "Well, one evening I was 
sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the banjo, 
when I heard the missis — our colored domestic, an old darkey of the 
Aunt Dinah pattern — singing one of the outlandish camp-raeeting 
hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an extremely " Migious" 
character and, although seized with the impulse to do so, I hesitated 
to take up the tune and finish it. I did so, however, in the dialect I 
have adopted, and which I then thought and still think is in strict con- 
formity to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose 
verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to her, irreverent 
rime ever before invented, all the while accompanying it on the banjo 
and imitating the fashion of the plantation negro. ... 1 was then 
about sixteen and as I had soon after a Uke inclination to versify, was 
myself pleased with the performance, and it was accepted by a pub- 
lisher, I have continued to work the vein indefinitely." 

To what extent the poet was indebted to the Pike balladry that 
had preceded his first work, at least so far as wide publication in 
Northern magazines was concerned, is not easily determined. It 
seems extremely probable that he had seen it. Lanier, as has 
been shown, had published negro dialect poetry in Scribner's 
nearly a year before Russell, but whoever was pioneer, the author 
of "Christmas-night in the Quarters" was the one who first 
caught the attention of the reading public and exerted the great- 

6 The Critic, November 3, 1888. 



290 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

est influence upon the period. He undoubtedly was the leading 
pioneer. Page and Gordon dedicated their Befo' de War "To 
Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo," and Joel Chandler 
Harris, manifestly an authority, declared that "Irwin Russell 
was among the first — if not the very first — of Southern writers to 
appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character, and 
of the unique relations existing between the two races before the 
war, and was among the first to develop them." ^ 

In the last year of his life Russell, encouraged by the reception 
of his magazine poems, went to New York to make literature his 
profession. Bunner, the editor of Puck, and Gilder and Robert 
Underwood Johnson of the Century staff, and others, recognized 
his ability, and gave him every encouragement possible. One of 
the most prominent of the poets of the older school, it may be 
remarked, also became interested in him and urged him to drop 
the ephemeral type of verse to which he had addicted himself and 
devote his talents to really serious work. For a brief period he 
obeyed, with what success one may judge from the poems at the 
end of his volume. 

Success came too late. His friends were powerless to control 
his wayward genius. His frail constitution gave way. From a 
bed of fever he arose still half delirious, staggered to the docks, 
engaged to work his way on a New Orleans boat as a coal-heaver, 
and in New Orleans secured a position on the Times. But the 
end was near. To a member of the Times staff he opened his 
heart in words that might have come from Poe : 

It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with the 
pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my wife, and 
friends who believed in my future. I have watched them lose heart, 
lose faith, and again and again I have been so stung and startled that 
I have resolved to save myself in spite of myself. ... I never shall.* 

He died a few weeks later. 

VIII 

The value of Russell's work depends not so much upon the 
poetic quality of it as upon the faithfulness and the skill with 
which he has portrayed the negro. Within this narrow field he 
has had no superior. Harris has summed it up thus : 

7 Introduction to Russell's Poems. 

8 Library of Southern Literature, 4663. 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 291 

The most wonderful thing about the dialect poetry of Irwin Russell 
is his accurate conception of the negro character. The dialect is not 
always the best — it is often carelessly written — but the negro is there, 
the old-fashioned, unadulterated negro, who is still dear to the Southern 
heart. There is no straining after effect — indeed the poems produce 
their result by indirection; but I do not know where could be found 
to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of negro character." 

Russell is less romantic in his picture of the negro than are 
Page and Harris. Once in a while he throws the mellow light 
over the old days, as in "Mahsr John," where he represents the 
freed slave dwelling in imagination upon the glories that he has 
once known, but he holds the strain not long : 

I only has to shet my eyes, an' den it seems to me 
I sees him right afore me now, jes' like he use' to be, 
A-settin' on de gal'ry, lookin' awful big an' wise, 
Wid little niggers fannin' him to keep away de flies. 

He alluz wore de beny bes' ob planters' linen suits, 

An' kep' a nigger busy jes' a-blackin' ob his boots; 

De buckles on his galluses wuz made of solid gol', 

An' diamon's ! — dey wuz in his shut as thick as it would hoi'. 

Page would have stopped after the old negro had ended his glori- 
fication of the old days, but Russell hastens to bring the picture to 
present-day conditions : 

Well, times is changed. De war it come an' sot de niggers free, 
An' now ol' Mahsr John ain't hardly wuf as much as me ; 
He had to pay his debts, an' so his Ian' is mos'ly gone— 
An' I declar' I 's soriy fur my pore ol' Mahsr John. 
It was essentially the later negro, the negro of the poet 's own day, 
that is represented in the poems. He has become a farmer for 
himself now and tries sly tricks when he takes his cotton to 
market. Detected, he is voluble in his explanations : 

Rocks in dat ar cotton! How de debbil kin dat be? 

I packed dat bale mys'f— hoi' on a minute, le'— me— see— 

My stars! I mus' be crazy! Mahsr Johnny, dis is fine! 

I's gone an' hauled my brudder's cotton in, stead ob nnne! 
He sends his boy to work as waiter on the river boats and as he 
is departing overwhelms him with advice : 

Dem niggers what runs on de ribber is mos'ly a mighty shaip set; 
Dey'd fin' out some way fur to beat you, ef you bet em de water 
wuz wet ; 
9 Introduction to Russell's Poems. 



292 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Tou's got to watch out for dem fellers; dey'd cheat off de horns ob 

a cow. 
I knows 'em; I foUered de ribber 'fore ebber I follered a plow. 

He is inordinately fond of preaching, as witness "Half-way 
Doin's" and "A Sermon for the Sisters." He delights to inter- 
pret the Scriptures, and his exegesis is often full of local color : 

"Dar's gTvine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' solemn — 

Fur Noah tuk the Herald, an' he read de ribber column — 

An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-cl'arin' timber-patches, 

An' 'lowed he 's gwine to build a boat to beat the steamah Natchez. 

AH the characteristics of the negro are touched upon with the 
certainty of perfect knowledge: his superstitions, his ignorance 
of the world, his awe of legal terms, his humor, his simple trust 
in his religion, his childlike attitude toward nature, his habit of 
addressing sententious language to his beasts of burden as if they 
understood all he said, his conceit, and his firm belief in im- 
mortality. 

Russell was one of the pioneers of the new era which had as its 
most marked characteristic the use of American themes and back- 
grounds and absolute truth to American life. No section of the 
social era was too lowly or unknown for him to take as material 
for his art. He could even plan to write a negro novel with all 
of its characters negroes and write the first chapters. Little, 
however, that he planned ever came to completion. The thin 
volume of poems published after his death was but a fragment of 
what he might have written under happier conditions. As it is, 
he must, like Lanier, be treated as one of those brief excited lives 
that are found ever at the opening of new romantic eras — Novalis, 
Chatterton, Burns, Keats — poets who left behind only fragments 
of what might have been, but who influenced enormously the 
writers that were to be. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

PAtHL Hamilton Hayne. (1830-1886.) Poems, Boston, 1855; Sonnets 
and Other Poems, 1857; Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos, 1860; 
Legends and Lyrics, Philadelphia, 1872; The Mountain of the Lovers, 
with Poems of Nature and Tradition, 1875; Life of Robert Young Hayne, 
1878; Life of Hugh Swinton Legare, 1878; Complete edition of the Poems 
with a sketch by Margaret J. Preston, 1882. 

Henby Timrod. (1829-1867.) Poems, Boston, 1860; Complete edition 



LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH 293 

of the Poems with biographical introduction of 60 pages by Paul Hamil- 
ton Hayne, 1872; Poems of Henry Timrod, 1901. 

Sidney Laniir. (1842-1881.) Tiger Lilies: a Xovel, 18G7; Florida: 
Its Scenery, Climate, and History, 1876; Poems, 1877; The Boy's Frois- 
sart. Being Sir John Froissart's Chronicles of Adventure, Battle, and 
Custom in England, France, Spain, etc. Edited for Boys, 1878; The 
Science of English Verse, 1880; The Boy's King Arthur. Being Sir Thomas 
Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. 
Edited for Boys, 1880; The Boy's Mabinogion. Being the Earliest ^^'el8h 
Tales of King Arthur in the Famous Red Book of Hergest. Edited for 
Boys, 1881; The Boy's Percy. Being Old Ballads of War, Adi^enture, and 
Love, from Bishop, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 
Edited for Boys, 1882; The English Novel and the Principles of Its 
Development, 1883; Poems of Sidney Lanier, Edited by His Wife, with a 
Memorial by William Hayes Ward, 1884; Select Poema of Sidney Lanier, 
edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, by Morgan Calla- 
way, 1895; Music and Poetry: Essays, 1898; Retrospects and Prospects: 
Descriptive and Historical Essays, 1899; Letters of Sidney Lanier. Se- 
lections from His Correspondence 1866-1881, 1899; Shalcespeare and His 
Forerunners, 1902; Sidney Lanier, by Edwin Miras, 1905. Sotne Rem- 
iniscences and Early Letters of Sidney Lanier, G. H. Clarke, 1907; Poem 
Outlines, 1908; Synthesis and Analysis of the Poetry of Sidney Lanier, 
C. C. Carroll, 1910. 

Irwin Russell. Poems by Irwin Russell. With an introduction by 
Joel Chandler Harris. New York. 1888. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 

Just as the West of Mark Twain, Harte, Miller, Eggleston, 
and others had been central in the literature, especially in the 
fiction, of the seventies, so the South became central in the 
eighties. Southern writers like Cable, Lanier, and Russell began 
their distinctive work not long after the opening of the Bret 
Harte period, yet it was not until after Old Creole Days, 1879, 
the death of Russell in the same year and of Lanier in 1881, 
and the publication of Miss Woolson's Rodman the Keeper and 
the first Uncle Remus book in 1880, Johnston's Dukesborough 
Tales, 1883, and Craddock's In the Tennessee Mountains, 1884, 
that what we may call the era of Southern themes and Southern 
WTiters may be said fully to have taken possession of American 
literature. By 1888 Albion W. Tourgee could write in the 
Forum, "It cannot be denied that American fiction of to-day, 
whatever may be its origin, is predominatingly Southern in type 
and character. ... A foreigner studying our current literature, 
without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization 
by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was 
the seat of intellectual empire in America and the African the 
chief romantic element of our population." 

The real cause of this outburst has not often been touched 
upon. The sudden vogue of Southern themes and Southern 
writers came not, as some have explained, from the fact that a 
distinctive Southern literature had arisen, or that a peculiar 
school had sprung up in one section of the country, just as, for 
instance, we may speak of the New England school earlier in 
the century. Nor is it explained by the theory that the close 
of the war brought a new feeling of individuality to the South, 
a consciousness of its own self which was to find expression in 
a group of writers, as England after the wars with Spain found ex- 
pression in the Elizabethans. It was not a merely local manifesta- 
tion. The term ' ' Southern Literature, ' ' as now found in the titles 

284 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 295 

of an increasing number of books and studies, is misleading. If 
the South, or any other section, is to produce a distinct literature 
of its own, that section must possess not alone themes and writers, 
but publishers as well, and widely circulated magazines of the 
type of the Atlantic and the Century and Harper's. It must 
have also critics and adequate critical standards, and, most im- 
portant of all, it must have a clientele, readers enough to dispose 
of its own literary product. The South has had practically none 
of these save the literary themes and the writers. The turn of 
the tide from Western material and Western workers to material 
and workers from the South was a national phenomenon. It 
was in reality more a thing of the North than it was of the South. 
Without Northern publishers and magazines and criticism and 
readers there would have been no Southern literature. 

To illustrate with a concrete example: Richard Malcolm 
Johnston published at Augusta, Georgia, in 1864, Georgia 
Sketches hy an. Old Man. In 1871 he added more tales to the 
collection, published them in the Southern Magazine of Balti- 
more, issued them in book form in the same city, with the title 
Dukeshoroiigh Tales, and a little later put forth a second and 
enlarged edition. Yet Edward Eggleston could say when John- 
ston as late as 1879 published his first story in a Northern maga- 
zine, "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Conditions," in Scrihner's Monthly, 
that the reading public everywhere hailed his advent as that of a 
new and promising young man who had sent in his first story. 
It was not until the Harpers in 1883 issued a Northern edition 
of the much-published Dukeshorough Tales that Johnston ceased 
to be a producer of merely Southern literature. 

The cause of the Southern tone which American literature took 
on during the eighties lies in the single fact that the Soutli had 
the literary material. The California gold, rich as it was when 
first discovered by the East, was quickly exhausted. There were 
no deep mines; it was surface gold, pockets and startling nug- 
gets. Suddenly it was discovered that the South was a field 
infinitely richer, and the tide turned. Nowhere else were to be 
found such a variety of picturesque t^T^s of humanity : negroes, 
crackers, Creoles, mountaineers, moonshiners, and all those in- 
conoruous elements that had resulted from the great social up- 
heaval of 1861-1865. Behind it in an increasingly romantic 
perspective lay the old regime destroyed by the war; nearer was 



296 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

the war itself, most lieroie of struggles ; and still nearer was the 
tragedy of reconstruction with its carpet-bagger, its freed slaves, 
and its Klu-Klux terror. Never before in America, even in Cali- 
fornia, had there been such richness of literary material. That 
a group of Southern-born writers should have arisen to deal with 
it was inevitable. Who else could have dealt with it, especially 
in the new era that demanded reality and absolute genuineness? 
No Northerner could have revealed, for instance, the heart of 
the old plantation negro. Miss Woolson's stories of the South, 
brilliant as they are, are in a different world from those of Joel 
Chandler Harris. 

The writers themselves made no claim that they were pro- 
ducing a Southern literature. They had, all of them, been touched 
by the new after-the-war spirit, and their outlook was nation 
wide. Cable in an address at Oxford, Mississippi, in June, 1882, 
pleaded for home subjects as a basis for literature, but for home 
subjects treated in a spirit of the broadest nationality: "Only 
let them be written," he urged, "to and for the whole nation and 
you shall put your own State not the less but the more in your 
debt."^ He declared himself to be not at all in favor of the 
popular new phrase ' ' the new South " ; he would change it, he 
said, to "the no South." Lanier, as we have seen, was American 
in the broadest sense, and Joel Chandler Harris could say: 
* ' What does it matter whether I am a Northerner or Southerner if 
I am true to truth and true to that larger timth, my own true 
self? ]My idea is that truth is more important than sectionalism 
and that literature that can be labeled Northern, Southern, West- 
em, Eastern, is not worth labeling." ^ 

It was the voice of the new spirit of the new age. 



That the enormous vogue of the Bret Harte and the Pike 
County Ballads literature of the early seventies could have passed 
unnoticed even in the remotest sections of America seems im- 
probable, but to attempt to trace the influence it exerted on the 
group of Southern writers that sprang up shortly after it had 
made its appearance is useless and worse than useless. Not for a 



1 Boston Literary World, June 28, 1882. 

2 Mims's Sidney Lanier, 284. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 297 

moment must it be forgotten that this earlier "Western outburst 
was not a local evolution that succeeded in attracting the atten- 
tion of the nation; it was rather the first result of a condition 
which was general and nation wide. It was the new after-the- 
war demand for life and reality and democracy, and it broke out 
first in the West because the West at that moment had material 
which was peculiarly fitted to make an appeal. Had the West at 
that crisis had no writers ready to exploit this material, the out- 
burst undoubtedly would have come from the South. Cable and 
Lanier and Johnston and Russell would have written very much 
as they did write had Bret Harte and Mark Twain and Edward 
Eggleston never lived. 

There were influences and conditions in the South that were 
peculiarly favorable to the production of the type of literature 
demanded by the time. Georgia in particular offered congenial 
soil. The middle region of the State was the most democratic 
part of the South. It had been settled by a sturdy race which 
separation from the more aristocratic areas had rendered 
peculiarly individual. At one extreme was the mountain 
cracker, a type which had been made peculiar only by isolation, 
at the other were such remarkable men as Alexander H. Stephens, 
Atticus G. Ilaygood, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, and 
Henry W. Grady. The social system was peculiar. Relations 
between master and slave were far different from those found 
on the larger plantations where overseers were employed. The 
negroes were known personally ; they were a part of the family. 
Relations like those described so delightfully by Joel Cliandler 
Harris were common. "There was no selling," as Johnston ex- 
pressed it; "black and white children grew up together. Serv- 
ants descended from father to son." The result of this de- 
mocracy was a natural tendency toward the new realistic type 
of localized literature. Wliile the rest of the South had been 
romantic and little inclined to use its own backgrounds and its 
own local types of character, Georgia had been producing since 
the mid years of the century studies of its own peculiar types 
and institutions. 

As early as 1835 had appeared Georgia Scenes, Characters, 
Incidents, etc., in the First Half Century of the Uc public. By 
a Native Georgian, from the pen of Augustus B. Longstreet, 
graduate of Yale, lawyer, preacher, college president. It was 



298 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

republished in New York in 1840 and from that day it has never 
been out of print. A realistic, brutal series of sketches it is, full 
of ear-chewing fights, cruel gougings, horse-racings, horse-swaps, 
coarse practical jokes, and all the barbarous diversions of a 
primitive people in a primitive time. Its author apologizes in 
his preface for the ephemeral character of the book: the stories 
and sketches, he explains, are ' ' nothing more than fanciful com- 
binations of real incidents and characters." Yet few books of 
its decade have had more vitality. The author worked first hand 
in the materials of the life that he himself had seen about him. 
It is true at every point. Its author, a generation ahead of 
his times, summed up in one phrase the new realism that was 
to come: "real people and real incidents in fanciful combina- 
tions. ' ' 

Associated with Longstreet in this earlier realistic period of 
Georgia were Oliver Hillhouse Prince (1787-1837), who con- 
tributed to Georgia Scenes "The Militia Drill," a sketch read 
perhaps by Thomas Hardy before he wrote his Trumpet-Major^ 
and William Tappan Thompson (1812-1882), whose Major 
Jones's Chronicles appeared in book form in Philadelphia in 
1840. 

There was another element in Georgia during the earlier 
period which had strong influence upon the later group of 
writers, and allowed it to produce not only Richard Malcolm 
Johnston and Joel Chandler Harris and "Bill Arp," but poets 
like Ticknor and Lanier as well. In the cities and larger towns 
of the State there was an atmosphere of culture unique in the 
South. Harry Stillwell Edwards would account for it by calling 
attention to an element usually overlooked: 

In the late thirties — 1839 to be exact — Wesleyan Female College 
came into being at Macon — the first chartered college for women in 
the world, and soon began to turn out large classes of highly educated 
and accomplished graduates. The majority of these came from 
Georgia, but the whole South has always been represented in Wesleyan. 
Without going into this subject, I wish to state as my personal opinion 
that Georgia's literary development, which is undoubtedly more exten- 
sive than that of other Southern States, is due to the intellectual and 
spiritual soil or environment produced by this College in the fifty years 
of its existence previous to 1890. You will understand hovp this can be 
true though the mothers of the State's best known writers may not have 
been graduates. In my youth, evei-y girl associate I bad was of this 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 299 

college. Its atmosphere was everywhere apparent. To-day its grad- 
uates lead all over the State.^ 

One may trace these elements— the Longstreet realism at the 
one extreme and the IMacon College influence at the other— in all 
the later Georgia writers. AVe have found how Lanier in his 
earlier work alternated between broad cracker sketches and 
dialect ballads and the more elegant forms of prose and poetry. 
Even a poem as rhapsodic as his "Com" contains within it a 
realistic picture of the thriftless Georgia planter. It was from 
the blending of these two streams of influence that there came 
some of the strongest literature of the new period. 

II 

The link between Longstreet and the younger Georgia writers 
is to be found in Richard IMalcolm Johnston. Chronologically — 
he was bom in 1822 — he belongs to the earlier group, the gen- 
eration of Lowell and Story, Boker and Read and Edward 
Everett Hale, and he seems to have been touched not at all by 
the literary influences that had so strongly exerted themselves 
upon the writers of the seventies. He was reared on a central 
Georgia plantation with all the surroundings of the old regime ; 
he had been educated in the type of rural school so graphically 
described in his earlier sketches and then later at Mercer Col- 
lege, from which he was graduated in 1841 ; he gave the vigorous 
years of his life to the law and then to teaching; and after he 
was sixty years of age began seriously to devote himself to the 
profession of literature. 

As early as 1857 he had begun writing sketches of provincial 
life after the Longstreet pattern. His first piece, "The Goose 
Pond School" was followed at long intervals by others in the 
same vein, written, the greater part of them, after his removal to 
Baltimore partly to assist his friend Turnbull, the editor of 
the Southern Magazine, who had asked for his help, and partly 
"to subdue as far as possible the feeling of homesickness for my 
native region. It never occurred to me that they were of any 
sort of value. Yet when a collection of them, nine in all, was 
printed by Mr. Turnbull, who about that time ended publication 
of his magazine, and when a copy of tliis collection fell into the 

3 Letter to the Author, December, 1014. 



300 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

hands of Henry M. Alden, of Harper's Magazine, whose acquaint- 
ance I had lately made, he expressed much surprise that I had 
not received any pecuniary compensation, and added that he 
would have readily accepted them if they had been offered to 
him. Several things he said about them that surprised and 
gratified me much. I then set into the pursuit of that kind of 
work. ' ' * 

Johnston owed his introduction to Northern readers almost 
wholly to Lanier, who also was an exile in Baltimore. His in- 
fluence it was that induced Gilder to accept for Scribner's 
Monthly the first of the Dukeshorough Tales to be published in 
the North. He did far more than this : he gave him constructive 
criticism; he pointed out to him weaknesses which might be 
tolerated in a pioneer like Longstreet, but not in the work of a 
later artist. Certain phases of his sketches he found exceedingly 
strong: "The story strikes me as exquisitely funny, and your 
reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among the 
rural Georgians is really wonderful. ' ' ^ There were, however, 
frequent "verbal lapses" which were almost fatal, "the action 
of the story does not move fast enough," and the catastrophe is 
clumsily handled. "I will try to see you in a day or two and 
do this" [read the manuscript aloud to him with running 
criticisms]. It was an opportunity that few authors ever get; 
and Johnston was wise enough to make the fullest use of it. 
Through Lanier it was that Alden became acquainted with his 
work and that the enlarged Dukeshorough Tales was taken over 
by the Harpers, and it was only after the Northern issue of this 
book in 1883 that its author took a place among the writers of 
the period. During the following fifteen years he wrote vo- 
luminously. 

Lanier's criticism touches with skill the strength and the weak- 
ness of Johnston as a writer of fiction. Like Longstreet, he was 
preeminently a maker of sketches. In his novels like Old Mark 
Langston and Widow Guthrie he failed dismally. Local color 
there is and humor and characterization, but in all that pertains 
to plot management the novels are feeble. The center and soul 
of his art was the Georgia environment. ' ' As long as the people 
in my stories have no fixed surroundings, they are nowhere to 

* AutotiograpJiy, 72. 

5 Mims's Sidney Lanier, 297. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 30] 

me; I cannot get along with them at all." There is little of 
story, little of action, little consideration of the deeper passions 
and motives of life: there is rather an artless presentation of 
the archaic provincial types and surroundings that he had known 
in his boyhood. Even within this restricted area his range 
was narrow. He seemed to be attracted, as was Longstreet, 
by the eccentric and the exceptional. As he looked back into his 
earlier years it was only the highly individualized characters 
and surroundings that stood out in his memory, and he peopled 
his stories largely with these. Like Lincoln he had traveled a 
primitive legal circuit in primitive days and he had had unique 
experiences highly laughable. His range of characters also is 
small. There is little of the negro in his work: he deals almost 
wholly with the class of middle Georgia common people that are 
but one step removed from the mountain cracker of Harris and 
Harbin. 

Johnston was to the Southern movement what Eggleston was to 
the Western. The two have many points of resemblance. Both 
were humorists, both worked in the crude materials of early 
American life, and both seem to have evolved their methods and 
their literaiy ideals very largely from themselves. Neither was 
an artist. They will live largely because of their fidelity to a 
vanished area of American life. 



Ill 

Joel Chandler Harris also continued the tradition of Long- 
street and worked in the materials of Georgia life with little 
suggestion from without. There are few instances of a more 
spontaneous lapsing into literaiy expression. He had been reared 
in an environment as unliterary as Mark Twain's. Longstreet 
and Johnston, Russell and Lanier, were all college men, but 
Harris's school education ended when he was twelve, and the 
episode that ended it, a most unusual one, he has described thus : 

One day while Joe Maxwell was sitting in the post-office looking over 
the Milledgeville papers, his eye fell on an advertisement that interested 
him greatly. It seemed to bring the whole world nearer to hnn. The 
advertisement set forth the fact that on next Tuesday the first number 
of the Countryman, a weekly paper, would be published. 1 1^ would be 
modeled after Mr. Addison's little paper, the Spectator, Mr. Gold- 
smith's little paper, the Bee, and Mr. Johnson's Uttle paper, the Ram- 



302 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

hler. It would be edited by J. A. Turner, and it would be issued on 
the plantation of the editor, nine miles from Hillsborough. Joe read 
this advertisement over a dozen times, and it was with a gTeat deal of 
impatience that he waited for the next Tuesday to come. 

But the day did come, and with it came the first issue of the Country- 
man. Joe read it from beginning to end, advertisements and all, and 
he thought it the most entertaining little paper he had ever seen. 
Among the interesting things was an announcement by the editor that 
he wanted a boy to learn the printing business. Joe borrowed pen and 
ink and some paper from the friendly postmaster, and wrote a letter to 
the editor, saying that he would be glad to learn the printing business. 
The letter was no doubt an awkward one, but it served its purpose, for 
when the editor of the Countryman came to Hillsborough he hunted 
Joe up, and told him to get ready to go to the plantation. . . . 

[The office] was a very small affair; the type was old and worn, and 
the hand-press — a Washington No. 2 — had seen considerable service. 
. . . He quickly mastered the boxes of the printer's case, and before 
many days was able to set type swiftly enough to be of considerable help 
to Mr. Snelson, who was foreman, compositor, and pressman. The 
one queer feature about the Countryman was the fact that it was the 
only plantation newspaper that has ever been published, the nearest 
post-office being nine miles away. It might be supposed that such a 
newspaper would be a failure ; but the Countryman was a success from 
the start, and at one time it reached a circulation of nearly two thousand 
copies. The editor was a very original writer. 

On the Plantation: a Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures 
during the War is the record, slightly disguised — Joe Maxwell 
is Joe Harris, and Hillsborough is Eatonton — of the four years 
in the boy 's life that made of him the Joel Chandler Harris that 
we know to-day. It was his college course, and it was a mar- 
velously complete one. He became a part of the great planta- 
tion; he shared its rude festivities; he came closely in contact 
with the old-time type of plantation negro; and, more impor- 
tant still, he discovered his employer's great library and was 
directed in his reading by Mrs. Turner, who took pains with 
the diffident young lad. In time he became himself a contributor 
to the paper, secretly at first, then openly with the editor's ap- 
proval. The end of the war and with it the end of the old 
plantation regime, ended also the Countryman and sent Harris 
into wider fields. 

For a time he worked at Macon, home of Lanier, then at New 
Orleans, where Cable in the intervals of office work was dream- 
ing over the old French and Spanish records, then for a time he 
was editor of the Forsyth, Georgia, Advertiser. The force and 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 303 

originality of his editorials attracted at length the attention of 
W. T. Thompson, author of the Georgia classic, Major Jones's 
Courtship, and in 1871 he secured him for his own paper, the 
Savannah News. Five years later, Harris went over to the At- 
lanta Constitution and during the twenty-five years that followed 
his life was a vital part of that journal's history. 

One must approach the literary work of Harris always with 
full realization that he was first of all a journalist. During the 
greater part of his life he gave the best of every day unreservedly 
to the making of his paper. Literary fame came to him almost 
by accident. To fill the inexorable columns of his paper he threw 
in what came easiest for him to write and he thought no more 
about it. Then one day he looked up from his desk to find him- 
self hailed as a rising man of letters. It amazed him ; he never 
half believed it; he never got accustomed to it. Years later in 
the full noon of his success he could say: "People insist on con- 
sidering me a literary man when I am a journalist and nothing 
else. I have no literary training and know nothing at all of 
what is termed literary art. I have had no opportunity to 
nourish any serious literary ambition, and the probability is that 
if such an opportunity had presented itself I would have refused 
to take advantage of it." Never once did he seek for publica- 
tion; never once did he send a manuscript to any publisher or 
magazine that had not earnestly begged for it; never once did 
he write a line with merely literary intent. 

His first recognition by the literary world came through a 
bit of mere journalism. The story is told best in the words of 
Harry Stillwell Edwards: 

About 1880, Sam Small of Atlanta, Georgia, on the local staff of the 
Constitution, began writing negi-o sketches, usmg ''Old 5m or Incle 
Si" as his vehicle, and soon made the character fam..us. Suuill, how- 
ever, was very dissipated, and frequently the Sunday mommg Old b. 
contribution failed to appear. Joel Chandler Hams, the para^rapher 
for the Constitution as he had been for the Sanannah News, was called 
on to supply something in place of the missing Si «ket^»f , ""^^^^^^^^^^^ 
with "Uncle Remus." His first contributions were not folk lore, but 
local. He soon drifted into the folk lore, however and recognizm? the 
beauty and perfection of his work, people generally who remembered 
the stories of their childhood, wrote out for him the main points and 
sent them I, mvself, contributed probably a dozen of the adventures of 
Brer Rabbit as I had heard them. This service he afterwards aoknowl- 



304 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

edged in a graceful card of thanks. Uncle Remus became, soon, the 
mouthpiece of the generation, so far as animal legends are concerned. 

The stories at once attracted attention in the North. The 
New York Evening Post and the Springfield Eepuhlican in par- 
ticular made much of them. As a direct result, Uncle Bemus: 
His Songs and Sayings; The Folk-lore of the old Plantation, 
appeared in 1880 and its author quickly found himself a national 
and indeed an international personage. 

The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields : sketches of 
the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the 
later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a 
writer must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast 
field of animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood 
of races, but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that 
gives him distinction. Ethnological and philological societies 
have done the work more scientifically. Many of the animal 
legends in common use among the slaves of the South were al- 
ready in print before he began to write.'' What he did was to 
paint a picture, minutely accurate, of the negro whom he had 
known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner at the transi- 
tion moment when the old was passing into the new. With a 
thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture 
that is complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of 
the race and yet its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, 
its philosophy, its conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of 
character, its quickness at repartee — nothing has been omitted. 
The story teller is more valuable than his story : he is recording 
unconsciously to himself his own soul and the soul of his race. 
Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in thinnest disguise, one does 
not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings to realize that. 
The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness of the negro, 
and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity and 
shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His 
ruses are the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme 
and founded on what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer 
Fox and Brer Wolf and the others who are beguiled, these ruses 
always succeed. The helpless little creature is surrounded on 
all sides by brutality and superior force; they seemingly over- 

6 See Riverside Magazine, November, 1868, and March, 1869; also Inde- 
pendent, September 2, 1875. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 305 

come him, but in the end they are defeated and always by force 
of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the supreme mo- 
ment. It is the very essence of the child story — the giant killed 
by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood, 
and all the others — for the negro himself was but a cliild. 

Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black 
race adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white regime. 
Harris rose superior to Page in that he made the negro not the 
background for a white aristocracy, but a living creature valu- 
able for himself alone ; and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch 
as he embodied the result of his studies not in a type but in a 
single negro personality to which he gave the breath of life. 
Harris's negro is the type plus the personal equation of an in- 
dividual — Uncle Remus, one of the few original characters which 
America has added to the world's gallery. 

It is worthy of note too that he interpreted with the same 
patience and thoroughness the music and the poeti-y of the negro. 
Russell was a lyrist with the gift of intuition and improvisation ; 
Harris was a deliberate recorder. The songs he wrot« are not 
literary adaptations, nor are they framed after the conventional 
minstrel pattern. They are reproductions. In his first intro- 
duction to Uncle Eemiis, His Songs and His Sayings he wrote: 

As to the songs, the reader is warned that it will be found difficult 
to make them conform to the ordinary rules of versification, nor is it 
intended that they should so conform. They are written, and are m- 
tended to be read, solely in reference to the regular invariable recur- 
rence of the caesura, as, for instance, the first stanza of the Revival 
Hymn: 

Oh, vvhar | shill we go | w'en de great | day comoa | 

Wid de blow | in' er de trumpits | en de Imn? | in' er do drums | 

Hoy man | y po' sin | ers '11 be kotch'd | out late | 

En fine | no latch | ter de gold | en gate | 

In other words, the songs depend for their melody and rhythm upon 
the musical quality of time, and not upon long or short, accented or 
unaccented, syllables. I am persuaded that this fact led Mr. i^duey 
Lanier, who is thoroughly familiar with the metrical peculianttes of 
neero Pnn"s, into the exhaustive investigation which has resulted m the 
publication of his scholarly treatise on The Science of English \ erse. 

Nowhere else does one come so completely into the feeling of 
negro music as in Harris. In "The Night Before Christmas," 



306 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

in Nights with Uncle Remus, a latter-day "Sir Roger de Coverley 
Paper," we feel the tone of it: 

His voice was strong and powerful, and sweet, and its range was as 
astonishing as its volume. More than this, the melody to which he 
tuned it, and which was caught up by a hundred voices almost as sweet 
and as powerful as his own, was charged with a mysterious and pathetic 
tenderness. The fuie company of men and women at the big house — 
men and women who had made the tour of all the capitals of Europe — 
listened with swellmg hearts and with tears in their eyes as the song 
rose and fell upon the air — at one moment a tempest of melody, at 
another a heart-breaking strain breathed softly and sweetly to the gentle 
winds. The song that the little boy and the fine company heard was 
something like this — ridiculous enough when put in cold type, but 
powerful and thrilling when joined to the melody with which the 
negroes had invested it : 

De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate, 

My honey, my love! 
Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late! 

My honey, my love! 
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate, 

My honey, my love! 
Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night. 

My honey, my love! 
My honey, my love, my heart's delight — 
My honey, my love! 



IV 

With the success of the first Uncle Remus book there came the 
greatest flood of dialect literature that America has ever known. 
The years 1883 and 1884 mark the high tide of this peculiar out- 
break, and to Georgia more than to any other locality may be 
traced the primal cause. In 1883 came what may be called the 
resurgence of the cracker, that Southeastern variety of the 
Pike which now came to the North as a new discovery. The 
leading characteristics of the type were thus set forth by Harris 
in his story of ' ' Mingo ' ' : 

Slow in manner and speech, shiftless in appearance, hospitable but 
suspicious toward strangers, unprogressive, toughly endurmg the poor, 
hard conditions of their lives, and oppressed with the melancholy 
silences of the vast, shaggy mountain solitudes among which they dwell. 
The women are lank, sallow, dirty. They rub snuff, smoke pipes — ■ 
even the young girls — and are great at the frying pan; full of a com- 
plaining patience and a sullen fidelity. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 307 

Again America became excited over a new Pike County type. 
Johnston's Dukeshorough Tales were issued for the first time 
in the North; Harris's "At Teague Poteet's, a Sketch of the 
Hog Mountain Range," appeared in the June Century, and 
Charles Egbert Craddoek's story of the same mountains, "The 
Harnt that Walks Chilhowee, ' ' came out the same month in the 
Atlantic. That was in 1883. The next year appeared Harris's 
Mingo, and Craddoek's In the Tennessee Mountains. Then the 
flood gates of dialect were loosened. The Century publislied 
Page's story "Mars Chan," wliich it had been holding for four 
years, a story told entirely in the negro dialect. The new and 
mysterious Craddock, who was found now to be Miss Mary N. 
Murfree, created a wide-spread sensation. In 1883 appeared 
James Whitcomb Riley's first book The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 
'Leven More Poems and Mary Ilallock Foote's The Led-IIorse 
Claim; in 1887 came Octave Thanet's Knitters in the Sun, 
dialect tales of the Arkansas canebrakes, and shortly afterwards 
Hamlin Garland's studies of farm life in the middle West. 
The eighties stand for the complete triumph of dialect and of 
local color. 

Henry James, viewing the phenomenon from his English stand- 
point, offered an explanation that is worthy of note: "Noth- 
ing is more striking," he wrote, "than the invasive part played 
by the element of dialect in the subject-matter of the American 
fictions of the day. Nothing like it, probably — nothing like any 
such predominance — exists in English, in French, in German 
work of the same order. It is a part, in its way, to all ap- 
pearance, of the great general wave of curiosity on the sub- 
ject of the soul aboundingly not civilized that has lately begun 
to well over the Anglo-Saxon globe and that has borne Mr. Rud- 
yard Kipling, say, so supremely high on its crest." 

Harris's work with the Georgia cracker, though small in 
quantity, is of permanent value. Unlike Craddock, he was upon 
his native ground and he worked with sympathy. He had not 
the artistic distinction and the ideality of Page, but he was able 
to bring his reader nearer to the material in which he worked. 
Page was romantic and his standpoint was essentially aristocratic ; 
Harris was realistic and democratic. He worked close always to 
the fundamentals of human life and his creations have alwaj-s 
the seeming spontaneousness of nature itself. 



308 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

As a writer Harris must be summed up as being essentially- 
fragmentary. His literary output was the work of a man who 
could write only in the odd moments stolen from an exacting 
profession. It is work done by snatches. He left no long mas- 
terpiece ; his novels like Gabriel Tolliver and the rest are full of 
delightful fragments, but they are rambling and incoherent. 
Of Plantation Pageants its author himself could say, ''Glancing 
back over its pages, it seems to be but a pa,tchwork of memories 
and fancies, a confused dream of old times." With his Brer 
Rabbit sketches, however, this criticism does not hold. By their 
very nature they are fragmentary; there was no call for con- 
tinued effort or for constructive power; the only demand was 
for a consistent personality that should emerge from the final 
collection and dominate it, and this demand he met to the 
full. 

No summary of Harris 's work can be better than his own com- 
ment once uttered upon Huckleberry Finn: "It is history, it 
is romance, it is life. Here we behold a human character stripped 
of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we 
laugh at their humor, share their griefs, and, in the midst of it 
all, behold we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice, and 
mercy. " To no one could this verdict apply more conspicuously 
than to the creator of Uncle Remus and of Teague Poteet. 



To the Georgia group belongs in reality Mary Noailles Mur- 
free, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock. Tennessee, her 
native State — she was bom at Murfreesboro in 1850 — was of 
Georgia settlement. On one side of the border as on the other 
one found a certain wild independence and originality and crude 
democracy, the same that voiced itself in Longstreet and Thomp- 
son, and later in Johnston and Harris. Moreover, the moun- 
tains of the Craddock tales lie along the Georgia border and 
their inhabitants are the same people who figured in Longstreet 's 
"Gander Pulling" and furnished Gorm Smallin and Teague 
Poteet for Lanier and Harris. 

During the seventeen years of her later childhood and youth, 
or from 1856 to 1873, Miss Murfree lived at Nashville, Tennessee, 
where her father had an extensive legal practice, and then until 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 309 

1882 she made her home at St. Louis, IMissouri. She was, there- 
fore, unlike Johnston and Harris, metropolitan in training and 
in point of view. Lameness and a certain frailness of physique 
caused by a fever debarred her from the activities of childhood 
and drove her in upon herself for entertainment. She was pre- 
cocious and she read enormously, pursuing her studies even intc 
the French and the Italian. Later she attended the academy at 
Nashville and then a seminary at Philadelphia, and, on her re- 
turn home, even began the study of law in her father's library. 

For such a woman, especially in the seventies, literature as a 
profession was inevitable. She began to write early and some of 
her apprentice papers, signed even then with the pen name 
Charles E. Craddock, found publication, notably a few sketches 
and tales in the weekly Appleton's Journal. It was conventional 
work and it promised little. Between a sketch like ' ' Taking the 
Blue Ribbon at the Fair" and "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's 
Cove," which appeared in the ]\Iay issue of the Atlantic, 1878, 
there is a gulf that even yet has not been fully explained. Un- 
doubtedly the early models that influenced her were George 
Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Bret Harte, but she has preserved lit- 
tle of her transition work. She came unheralded with her art 
fully matured. Whoever may have been her early masters, she 
was from the first autochthonic in style and material and in the 
atmosphere that she threw over all that she wrote. There was a 
newness to her work, a tang of the wild and elemental in the 
dialect, a convincing quality to the backgrounds painted in 
sentences like "An early moon was riding, clear and full, over 
this wild spur of the Alleghanies," that excited wide comment. 
It was not until 1884, however, that the new author may be 
said definitely to have arrived, for it was not until then that her 
stories were given the dignity of book form. 

With the publication of In the Tennessee Mountains came one 
of the most dramatic happenings that ever gave wings to a new 
book. Charles Egbert Craddock visited the Atlantic office and, 
to the amazement of Aldrich and Howells and Dr. Holmes, he 
was a woman. The sensation, coming as it did from the center 
of the old New England tradition, gave the book at once an in- 
ternational fame and made Charles Egbert Craddock a name as 
widely known as Dr. Holmes. She followed her early success 
with a long series of Tennessee mountain novels. Six of them— 



310 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, In the Clouds, The 
Despot of Broomsedge Cove, His Vanished Star, The Mystery of 
Witchface Mountain, and The Juggler — first appeared serially in 
the Atlantic, and, for a time at least, it seemed as if her work had 
taken its place among the American classics. 



VI 

Criticism of the Craddock novels must begin always with the 
statement that their author was not a native of the region with 
which she dealt. She had been bom into an old Southern family 
with wealth and traditions, and she had been reared in a city 
amid culture and a Southern social regime. The Tennessee moun- 
tains she knew only as a summer visitor may know them. For 
fifteen summers she went to the little mountain town of Beersheba, 
prototype undoubtedly of the "New Helvetia Springs" of her 
novels, and from there made excursions into the wilder regions. 
She saw the mountains with the eyes of the city vacationist: 
she was impressed with their wildness, their summer moods with 
light and shadow, their loneliness and their remote spurs and 
coves and ragged gaps. She saw them with the picture sense 
of the artist and she described them with a wealth of coloring 
that reminds one of Ruskin. In every chapter, often many times 
repeated, gorgeous paintings like these : 

A subtle amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes of the 
T' other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the variegated foli- 
age to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but about the base the air 
seemed dun-colored, though transparent; seen through it, even the red 
of the crowded trees was but a somber sort of magnificence, and the 
great masses of gray rocks, jutting out among them here and there, 
wore a darkly frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze 
of scarlet and gold in the full glory of the sunshine ; the topmost cliffs 
caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of green or 
grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry bushes, nourished 
in the heart of the deep fissures. 

Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the banki 
of the Seolacutta River, riotous with the late floods, fringed with the 
papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely glint he could see the 
sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a bronze green, above the interme- 
diate ranges: behind him was the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed 
from an unaccustomed standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white 
and amber clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a 



SOUTHERN THExMES AND WRITERS 311 

shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now only 
green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of translucent color 
on the purple slope. In such an environment the little rickety wooden 
mill — with its dilapidated leaking race, with its motionless wheel moss- 
grown, with its tottering supports throbbing in the rush of the water 
which rose around them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers 
about the door — might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink 
the scene was the acme of excitement and interest. 

A picture of summer it is for the most part painted lavishly 
with adjectives, and presented with impressionistic rather than 
realistic eifect. Every detail is intensified. The mountains of 
eastern Tennessee are only moderate ridges, yet in the Craddock 
tales they take on the proportions of the Canadian Rockies or the 
Alps. The peak that dominates In the Clouds seems to soar like 
a Mont Blanc : 

In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes its name, 
charged with the portent of the storm, the massive peak of Thnnder- 
head towers preeminent among the summits of the Great Smoky Moun- 
tains, unique, impressive, most subtly significant. What strange at- 
traction of the earth laid hold on this vagrant cloud-form? What un- 
explained permanence of destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in 
the foundations of the range? Kindred thunderheads of the air lift 
above the horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes and 
contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage they rise — 
rise! . . . Sometimes it was purple against the azure heavens; or gray 
and shai*p of outline on faint green spaces of the sky; or misty, im- 
material, beset with clouds, as if the clans had gathered to claim the 
changeling. 

Always the scenery dominates the book. It is significant that all 
of her early titles have in them the name of a locality, — the set- 
ting is the chief thing: Lost Creek, Big Injun Mounting, Har- 
rison's Cove, Chilhowee, the Great Smoky ]\Iountains, Broom- 
sedge Cove, Keedon Bluffs. In stories like The My.stcry of 
Witch-Face Mountain the background becomes supreme: tlie 
human element seems to have been added afterwards by a sort 
of necessity; the central character is the great witch-face on 
the mountain. 

It reminds one of Hardy, and then one remembers that when 
"The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in the 
Atlantic, The Return of the Native had for three months been 
running as a serial in Ilarper's Monthly, and that, somewhat 
later, In the "Stranger-People's" Country and Wessrx Folk ran 



312 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

for months parallel in the same magazine. It is impossible not 
to think of Hardy as one reads Where the Battle Was Fought, 
1884. The battle-field dominates the book as completely as does 
Egdon Heath The Return of the Native, and it dominates it in 
the same symbolic way : 

By wintry daylight the battle-field is still more ghastly. Gray with 
the pallid crab-grass which so eagerly usurps the place of the last sum- 
mer's crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. 
The armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for 
miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and 
bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in 
these segregated spots is never turned* Beneath the branches are rows 
of empty, yawning graves, where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily 
buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce 
the hardiest plowman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land 
is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent. 
A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the dis- 
mantled desolation of the plain. 

The title of the book — Where the Battle Was Fought — makes the 
battle-field central in the tragedy, and so it is with the short 
stories " 'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" and "Drifting Down 
Lost Creek. ' ' Nature is always cognizant of the human tragedy 
enacted before it and always makes itself felt. In The Juggler, 
Tubal Cain Sims believes that murder has been done: 

"He sighed an' groaned like suthin' in agony. An' then he says, so 
painful, 'But the one who lives — oh, what can I do — the one who 
lives !' " He paused abruptly to mark the petrified astonishment on 
the group of faces growing white in the closing dusk. 

An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope. At the 
sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound bayed from 
the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the river. A light, stellular 
in the gloom that hung about the lower levels, suddenly sprung up in 
the window. A tremulous elongated reflection shimmered in the shal- 
lows. 

But such effects in her work are fitful : one feels them strongly 
at times, then forgets them in the long stretches of dialect con- 
versation and description seemingly introduced for its own sake. 
Of the art that could make of Egdon Heath a constantly felt, 
implacable, malignant presence that harried and compelled its 
dwellers until the reader at last must shake himself awake as 
from a nightmare, of this she knew little. She worked by means 



SOCJTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 313 

of brilliant sketches; she relied upon her picturing power to 
carry the story, and as a result the effect is scattered. 

In her characterization she had all the defects of Scott: she 
worked largely with externals. She had an eye for groups posed 
artistically against a picturesque background as in that mar- 
velous opening picture in " 'Way Down on Lonesome Cove." 
She expended the greatest of care on costume, features, habits 
of carriage and posture, tricks of expression, individual oddities, 
but she seldom went deeper. We see her characters distinctly; 
not often do we feel them. In her major personages, like the 
Prophet, the Despot, the Juggler, we have little sympathetic in- 
terest, and it is impossible to believe that they were much more 
than picturesque specimens even to the author herself. To get 
upon the heart of the reader a character must first have been 
upon the heart of his creator. Here and there undoubtedly she 
did feel the thrill of comprehension as she created, a few times 
so keenly indeed that she could forget her art, her note book, 
and her audience. The one thing that seems to have touched 
her heart as she journeyed through the summer valleys and into 
the remote coves seems to have been the pitiful loneliness and 
heart-hungev of the women. Could she have done for all of 
her characters what she did for Celia Shaw and Madeline and 
Dorinda and a few other feminine souls, the final verdict upon 
her work might have been far different from what it must be now. 

Her stories necessarily are woven from scanty materials. In 
the tale of a scattered and primitive mountain community there 
can be little complication of plot. The movement of the story 
must be slow, as slow indeed as the round of life in the coves 
and the lonesome valleys. But in her long-drawn narratives 
often there is no movement at all. She elaborates details with 
tediousness and records interminable conversations, and breaks 
the thread to insert whole chapters of description, as in Chapter 
VI of The Juggler, which records the doings at a mountain re- 
vival meeting seemingly for the mere sake of the local color. 
Nearly all of her longer novels lack in constructive power. Like 
Harte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she could deal 
strongly with picturesque moments and people, but she lacked 
the ability to trace the growth of character or the slow trans- 
forming power of a passion or an ideal or a sin. 

Her style was peculiarly her own ; in this she was strong. It is 



314 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

worthy of note that in an age rendered styleless by the news- 
paper and the public school she was able to be individual to the 
extent that one may identify any page of her writings by the 
style alone. It is not always admirable: there is a Southern 
floridness about it, a fondness for stately epithet that one does 
not find in Harris or in others of the Georgia group. She can 
write that the search light made "a rayonnant halo in the dim 
glooms of the riparian midnight," and she can follow the jocose 
observation of a woman washing dishes with this tremendous 
sentence : " ' What fur ? ' demanded the lord of the house, whose 
sense of humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunt- 
ing anxiety, and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of 
his discovery, to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome 
metaphor with which his weighty spouse had characterized her 
dissatisfaction with the ordering of events." It may be interest- 
ing to know that the woman vouchsafed no reply. Rather, ' ' she 
wheezed one more line of her matutinal hymn in a dolorous 
cadence and with breathy interstices between the spondees." 

She is at her best when describing some lonely valley among 
the ridges, or the moonlight as it plays fitfully over some scene 
of mountain lawlessness, or some remote cabin "deep among the 
wooded spurs. ' ' In such work she creates an atmosphere all her 
own. Few other writers have so made landscape felt. One may 
choose illustrations almost at random: 

On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky Mountains, 
the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken save for one meager 
clearing. 

Deep among the wooded spurs Lonesome Cove nestles, sequestered 
from the world. Naught emigrates from thence except an importunate 
stream that forces its way through a rocky gap, and so to freedom be- 
yond. No stranger intrudes; only the moon looks in once in a while. 
The roaring wind may explore its solitudes; and it is but the vertical 
sun that strikes to the heart of the little basin, because of the massive 
mountains that wall it round and serve to isolate it. 

The night wind rose. The stars all seemed to have burst from their 
moorings and were wildly adrift in the sky. There was a broken 
tumiilt of billowy clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly among them, 
a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends, sometimes half submerged, 
once more gallantly stinaggling to the surface, and again sunk. The 
bare boughs of the trees beat together in a dirgelike monotone. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 315 

Nowhere is she commonplace; nowhere does she come down 
from the stately plane that she reaches always with her opening 
paragraph. Even her dialect is individual. Doubtless other 
writers have handled the mountain speech more correctly, doubt- 
less there is as uiuch of Charles Egbert Craddock in the curious 
forms and perversions as there is of the Tennessee mountaineers, 
yet no one has ever used dialect more convincingly than she or 
more effectively. She has made it a part of her style. 

The story of Charles Egbert Craddock is a storj^ of gradual 
decline. In the Tennessee Mountains was received with a uni- 
versality of approval comparable only with that accorded to 
The Luck of Roaring Camp. In her second venture, ^Vhere 
the Battle Was Fought, she attempted to break from the narrow 
limits of her first success and to write a Hardy-like novel of the 
section of Southern life in which she herself belonged, but it 
failed. From all sides came the demand that she return agaiu 
to her own peculiar domain. And she returned with The Prophet 
of the Great Smoky Mountains. It was praised, but with the 
praise came a note of dissatisfaction, a note that became more 
and more dominant with every novel that followed. Iler first 
short stories had appealed because of their freshness and the 
strangeness of their setting. IMoreover, since they were the fii*st 
work of a young writer they were a promise of better things to 
come. But the promise was not fulfilled. After The Juggler, 
her last attempt on a large scale to create a great Tennessee- 
mountains novel, she took the advice of many of her critics and 
left the narrow field that she had cultivated so carefully. She 
wrote historical romances and novels of contemporary life, but 
the freshness of her early work was gone. After 1897 she 
produced nothing that had not been done better by other 
writers. 

Her failure came not, as many have believed, from the pov- 
erty of her materials and the narrowness of her field. Thomas 
Hardy deliberately had chosen for his novels a region and a 
people just as primitive. A great novel should concern itself 
with the common fundamentals of humanity, and those funda- 
mentals, he believed, may be studied with more of accuracy in 
the isolated places where the conventions of polite society have 
not prevented natural expression. Or, to quote Hardy's own 
words : 



316 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Social environment operates upon character in a way that is oftener 
than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture by making the exteriors of 
men their screen rather than their index, as with untutored mankind. 
Contrasts are disguised by the crust of conventionality, picturesqueness 
obliterated, and a subjective system of description necessitated for the 
differentiation of character. In the one case the authoi-'s word has to 
be taken as to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they 
can be seen as in an ecorche.'' 

The failure of Charles Egbert Craddock came rather from* 
her inability to work with large masses of material and coordinate 
it and shape it into a culminating force. She was picturesque 
rather than penetrating, melodramatic rather than simple, a 
showman rather than a discerning interpreter of the inner mean- 
ings of life. She could make vivid sketches of a moment or of 
a group or a landscape, but she could not build up touch by 
touch a consistent and compelling human character. Her genius 
was fitted to express itself in the short story and the sketch, and 
she devoted the golden years of her productive life to the making 
of elaborate novels. A little story like " 'Way Down on Lone- 
some Cove" is worth the whole of the The Juggler or In the 
Clouds. The short stories with which she won her first fame 
must stand as her highest achievement. 

VII 

Later members of the Georgia group, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, 
Harry Stillwell Edwards, and William Nathaniel Harben, have 
continued the tradition of Longstreet and have dealt more or 
less realistically with the humbler life of their region. Miss 
Elliott with her The Durket Sperrit entered the domain of 
Charles Egbert Craddock and gave a new version of the moun- 
tain dialect. A comparison of this novel with The Juggler, 
which appeared the same year, is illuminating. The two writers 
seem to be complements of each other, the one strong where the 
other is weak. The story lacks the atmosphere, the poetic dig- 
nity, the sense of mystery^ and of mountain majesty so notable 
in the elder novelist, but it surpasses her in characterization and 
in sympathy. The people are tremendously alive. The tyran- 
nical old woman about whom the tale centers, with her narrow 
ideals and her haughty "Durket sperrit," dominates every page 

7 The Forum, 1888. 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 317 

as Egdon Heath dominates The Return of the Native. She is 
felt during every moment of the story and so is the pathetic 
little mountain waif in the earlier chapters of Jerry. !Miss 
Elliott's distinctive work is limited to these two books. Had 
she had the courage to work out with clearness the central 
tragedy of The Durket Sperrit, the deliberate disgracing of 
Hannah by her discarded lover, the book might take its place 
among the few great novels of the period. 

Edwards inclined more toward the old Georgia type of hu- 
man-nature sketch. His best work is to be found in his short 
studies in black and white after the Johnston pattern. Indeed, 
his first story, "Elder Brown's Backslide," Harper's Monthly, 
1885, without his name would have been regarded as a Dukes- 
borough Tale. He has written two novels, one of which, Sons and 
Fathers, was awarded the $10,000 prize offered by the Chicago 
Record for a mystery story, but he is not a novelist. He is hu- 
morous and picturesque and often he is for a moment the master 
of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing command- 
ingly distinctive. 



VIII 

Constance Fenimore "Woolson's Rodman the Keeper, 1880, un- 
doubtedl}^ was a strong force in the new Southern revival. Dur- 
ing the eighties Miss Woolson was regarded as the most prom- 
ising of the younger writers. She was a grand niece of Cooper, 
a fact made much of, and she had written short stories of unusual 
brilliance, her collection, CaMle Nowhere, indeed, ranking as a 
pioneer book in a new field. Again was she destined to be a 
pioneer. In 1873 the frail health of her mother sent her into 
the South and for six years she made her home in Florida, spend- 
ing her summers in the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, 
South Carolina, and Georgia. During the rest of her life her 
stories were studies of Southern life and Southern conditions. 
Only Anne of her novels and two late collections of Italian tales 
may be noted as exceptions. 

It was in Rodman the Keeper, a collection of her magazine 
stories of the late seventies, that the North found its first ade- 
quate picture of the territory over which had been fought tlie 
Civil War. The Tourgee novels, which had created a real sensa- 



318 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

tion, were political documents, but here were studies carefully 
wrought by one who did not take sides. It showed the desola- 
tion wrought by the armies during the four years, the pathos of 
broken homes and ruined plantations, the rankling bitterness, 
especially in the hearts of women, the helpless pride of the sur- 
vivors, and the curious differences between the Northern and 
the Southern temperaments. It was careful work. Contem- 
porary opinion seemed to be voiced by the Boston Literary 
World: The stories "more thoroughly represent the South than 
anything of the kind that has been written since the war." 

Necessarily the standpoint was that of an observer from with- 
out. There was no dialect in the tales, there were no revealings 
of the heart of Southern life as in Harris and Page and the others 
who had arisen from the material they used, but there was beauty 
and pathos and a careful realism that carried conviction. A 
sketch like ' ' Felipe, ' ' for example, is a prose idyl, ' ' Up the Blue 
Ridge" is the Craddock region seen with Northern eyes, and the 
story that gives the title to the book catches the spirit of the de- 
feated South as few writers not Southern born have ever done. 

For a time Miss Woolson held a commanding place among 
the novelists of the period. After her untimely death in 1894 
Stedman wrote that she "was one of the leading women in the 
American literature of the century," and again, "No woman 
of rarer personal qualities, or with more decided gifts as a 
novelist, figured in her own generation of American writers," 
But time has not sustained this contemporary verdict. Her am- 
bitious novel Anne, over which she toiled for three years, brilliant 
as it may be in parts, has not held its place. And her short 
stories, rare though they may have been in the day of their new- 
ness, are not to be compared with the perfect art of such later 
writers as Miss King and I\Irs, Chopin. She must take her place 
as one of the pioneers of the period who discovered a field and 
prepared an audience for writers who were to follow. 



IX 

The appearance of Page's In Ole Virginia, 1887, marks the 
culmination of the period of Southern themes. The sensation 
caused by The Quick or the Dead? by Amelie Rives (later 
Princess Troubetzkoy) in 1888 need only be referred to. It had 



SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS 319 

little significance either local or otherwise. The younger writers, 
born for the most part at a later date, like John Fox, Jr., Mary 
Johnston, and Ellen Glasgow, belong to another period. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

RiCHAED Malcolm Johnston. ( 1822-1S08.) The English Classics, 
I860; Georgia Sketches, by an Old Man, 1864; Dtikesborough Tales, 1871, 
1874, 1883, 1892; English Literature (with William Hand Browne), 1872;' 
Life of Alexander H. Stephens (with William Hand Browne), 1878; Old 
Mark Langston, a Tale of Duke's Creek, 1883; Mr. Absalom liillingslea 
and Other Georgia Folk, 1888; Ogcechee Cross Firings, 1880; The Primes 
and Their ?veighbors, 1891; Studies Literary and Scientific, 1891; Mr. 
Billy Downs and His Likes, 1892; Mr. Fortner's Marital Claims and 
Other Stories, 1892; Tioo Gray Tourists, 1893; Widow Guthrie, 1893; 
Little Ike Templin and Other Stories, 1894; Old Times in Middle Georgia, 
1897; Pearce Amerson's Will, 1898. 

Joel Chandler Hakris. (1848-1908.) Uncle Remus, His Songs and His 
Sayings, 1880; ?>^ights with Uncle Remus, Myths and Legends of the Old 
Plantation, 1883; Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White, 1884; 
Story of Aaron, 1885; Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches, 1887; Daddy 
Jake the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark, 1889; Balaam and 
His Master, and Other Sketches and Stories, 1891; On the Plantation, a 
Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War, 1892; Uncle Rcmua 
and His Friends, 1892; Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country, 
1894; Mr. Rabbit at Home, 1895; Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaint- 
ances, 1896; Georgia from the Invasion of De Soto to Recent Times, 1896; 
Stones of Georgia, 1896; Aaron in the Wildwood^, 1897; Tales of the 
Home Folks in Peace and War, 1898; Chronicles of Aunt Minerva Ann, 
1899; Plantation Pageants, 1899; On the Wing of Occasions, 1900; 
Gabriel Tolliver, a Story of Reconstruction, 1902; Making of a Statesman, 
and Other Stories, 1902; Wally Wandcroon, 1903; Little Union Scout, 
1904; Tar Baby and Other Rimes of Uncle Remus, 1904; Told by Uncle 
Remus; A'eio Stories of the Old Plantation, 1905. 

Constance Fenimore Woolson. (1840-1894.) The Old Stone House, 
1873; Castle 'Sowhere, 1875; Lake-Country Sketches, 1875; Rodman the 
Keeper, 1880; Anne, 1882; East Angels, 18S6; Jupiter Lights, 1SS9; 
Horace Chase, a Novel, 1894; The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories, 
1895; Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories, 1896; Mentonc, Cairo, and 
Corfu, 1896. 

Charles Egbert Craddock. (1850 .) In the Tennessee Moun- 
tains, 1884; Where the Battle Was Fought, 1885; Down the Ravine, 1885; 
The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1885; In the Clouds, 1880; 
The Story of Keedon Bluffs, 1887; The Despot of Broomsedge Cove, 1888; 
In the "Stranger People's" Country, 1891; His Vanished Star, 1894; The 
Phantoms of the Footbridge, 1895; The Mystery of WUrhfare Mnuntam 
1895- The Juggler, 1897; The Young Mountaineers, 1897: The Story of 



320 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Old Fort Louden, 1899; The Bmhwhackers and Other Stories, 1899; The 
Champion, 1902; A Specter of Power, 1903; Storm Center, 1905; The 
Frontiersman, 1905; The Amulet, 1906; The Windfall, 1907; The Fair 
Mississippian, 1908; Ordeal — A Mountain Story of Tennessee, 1912; Raid 
of the Guerrilla, 1912; The Story of Duciehurst, 1914. 

Saeah Barnwell Elliott. The Fehneres, 1880; A Simple Heart, 
1886; Jerry, 1890; John Paget, 1893; The Durket Sperret, 1897; An In- 
cident and Other Happenings, 1899; Sam Houston, 1900; The Making of 
Jane, 1901; His Majesty's Service and Other Plays. 

Hakey Still well Edwards. (1855 .) Two Runaways and Other 

Stories, 1889; Sons and Fathers, 1896; The Marbeau Cousins, 1898; His 
Defense, and Other Stories, 1898. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE LATER POETS 

Although prose forms, especially the novel and the short 
story, dominated the period, yet the amount of poetry- published 
from 1860 to 1899 surpasses, in mere bulk at least, all that had 
been produced in America before that date. In quality also it 
is notable. Stedman's An American Anthology has 773 pages 
of selections, and of this space 462 pages, or almost two-thirds, 
are given to the poets who made their first appearance during 
these forty years. Very many whom he mentions were only in- 
cidentally poets. A surprising number of those who are known 
to-day only as novelists or short story writers began their career 
with a volume and in some cases with several volumes of verse. 
Few indeed have been the writers who have not contributed 
poetical material. Among the poets are to be numbered writers 
as inseparably connected with prose as Thoreau, Burroughs, 
Howells, Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, S. Weir ^litchell, Miss 
Woolsou, Lew Wallace, Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, Harris, Page, I\Irs. 
Cooke, Ambrose Bieree, Alice Brown, Hamlin Garland, and A. S. 
Hardy. 

Those who may be counted as the distinctive poets of the era, 
the third generation of poets in America, make not a long list 
if only those be taken who have done new and distinctive work. 
Not many names need be added to the following twenty-five whose 
first significant collections were published during the twenty 
years following 1870: 

1870. Bret Harte. Plain Language from Truthful James. 

1871. John Hay. Pike County Ballads. 
1871. Joaquin Miller. Songs of the Sierras. 

1871. Will Carleton. Poems. 

1872. Celia Thaxter. Poems. 

1873. John Boyle O'Reilly. Songs of the Southern Seas. 
1875. Richard Watson Gilder. The New Day. 

1877. Sidney Lanier. Poems. 
321 



322 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 



1881 



Ina Coolbrith. A Perfect Day and Oilier Poems. 



1882. John Bannister Tabb. Poems. 

1883. James Whitcomb Riley. The Old Swimmin'-Hole. 

1883. George Edward Woodberry. The North Shore Watch. 

1884. Edith M. Thomas. A New Year's Masque. 
1884. Henry Cuyler Bunner. Airs from Arcady. 
1884. Louise Imogen Guiney. Songs at the Start. 

1886. Clinton Scollard. With Reed and Lyre. 

1887. Eugene Field. Culture's Garland. 
1887. Madison Cawein. Blooms of the Berry. 

1887. Robert Burns Wilson. Life and Love. 

1888. Irwin Russell. Dialect Poems. 

1889. Richard Hovey. The Laurel: an Ode. 

John James Piatt, Emma Lazarus, Emily Dickinson, and E. R 
Sill, whose first volumes fall outside of the twenty-years period, 
complete the number. 



For the greater part these later poets were children of the new 
era who with Whitman voiced their own hearts and looked at the 
life close about them with their own eyes. The more individual 
of them, the leading innovators who most impressed themselves 
upon their times — ^Whitman, Hay and Harte, Miller, Lanier and 
Russell — we have already considered. They rose above con- 
ventions and rules and looked only at life; they stood for the 
new Americanism of the period, and they had the courage that 
dared in a critical and fastidious age to break away into what 
seemed like crude and unpoetic regions. Not many of them could 
go to the extremes of Whitman, or even of Harte and Hay. Some 
would voice the new message of the times in the old key and the 
old forms ; others would adopt the new fashions but change not at 
all the old themes and the old sentiments. 

Of the latter class Will Carleton perhaps is the typical repre- 
sentative. By birth and training he belonged to the Western 
group of innovators represented by Mark Twain and Eggleston 
and Miller. He had been born in a log cabin in Michigan and 
he had spent all of his boyhood on a small, secluded farm. He 
had broken from his environment at twenty, had gained a college 
degree, and following the lead of his inclination had become a 



THE LATER POETS 323 

journalist, first in Detroit, then in Chicago, Boston, and New 
York. From journalism, especially in the seventies, it was but a 
step to literature. He would be a poet, and led by the spirit of 
his period he turned for material to the homely life of his boy- 
hood. He would make no realistic picture — no man was ever less 
fitted than he to reproduce the external features of a scene or a 
region — he would touch the sentiments and the emotions. "Bet- 
sey and I Are Out," published in the Toledo Blade in 1871, was 
the beginning. Then in 1873 came Farm Ballads, with such pop- 
ular favorites as "Over the Hills to the Poor-House" and "Gone 
with a Handsomer Man," a thin book that sold forty thousand 
copies in eighteen months. No poet since Longfellow had so ap- 
pealed to the common people. At his death in 1912 there had 
been sold of his various collections more than six hundred thou- 
sand copies. 

His poetry as we read it to-day has in it little of distinction; 
it is crude, for the most part, and conventional. It made its ap- 
peal largely because of its kindly sympathy, its homeliness, and 
its lavish sentiment. The poet played upon the chords of memory 
and home and childhood, the message of the earlier Longfellow 
cast into a heavily stressed and swinging melody that found a 
prepared audience. With E. P. Roe, his counterpart in prose, 
Will Carleton is largely responsible for prolonging the age of 
sentiment. 

A singer of a different type was John James Piatt, born in 
Indianaln 1835 and joint author with W. D. Howells of Poems of 
Two Friends, 1859. He was a classicist who caught the new 
vision and sought to compromise. Everywhere in his work a 
blending of the new and the old: the Western spirit that would 
voice the new notes of the Wabash rather than echo the old music 
of the Thames, that syren melody that had been the undoing of 
Taylor and Stoddard. In an early review of Stedman. 1 latt 
had found, as he characteristically termed it, "a too frequent l)e- 
trayal of Tennyson's floating musk in his singing-garments, and 
he had noted as his chief strength that "his representative sub- 
jects are American." ^ In making the criticism he touched upon 
his own weakness and his own strength. In all his volunios .on^ 
ventional work like "Rose and Root," "The Sunshine o 
Shadows," and "The Unheard" alternates with more original 
1 Atlantic Monthly, 41:313. 



324 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

poems, native in theme and to a degree native in spirit, like ''The 
Mower in Ohio, " " The Pioneer 's Chimney, " " Fires in Illinois, ' ' 
and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no straining for 
realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes for art the 
poems have little for criticism: they are classical and finished 
and beautiful. But they lack life. There is nothing about them 
that grips the reader's heart, nothing that fixes itself in the 
memory, no single line that has distinction of phrase. Even in 
the Western poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharp- 
ness, no atmosphere, no feeling of reality. It is art rather than 
life ; it is a conscious effort to make a poem. The case is typical. 
With the criticism one may sweep away once for all great areas 
of the poetry of the time. 

Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, 
whose work is to be found in so many literary fields of the period. 
His poetry, small in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is dis- 
tinctive. It is tonic with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. 
One stanza from the poem "At Lincoln's Grave," delivered be- 
fore the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1893, voices the new 
Western soul: 

His humor, born of virile opulence, 

Stung like a pungent sap or wild-fruit zest, 

And satisfied a universal sense 

Of manliness, the strongest and the best; 

A soft Kentucky strain was in his voice, 

And the Ohio's deeper boom was there. 

With some wild accents of old Wabash days, 

And winds of Illinois; 
And when he spoke he took us unaware, 
With his high courage and unselfish ways. 

II 

The successor of Carleton is James Wliitcomb Riley of In- 
diana, the leading producer during the later period of platforn 
and newspaper balladry. The early life of Riley was urban 
rather than rural. His father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a 
typical Western county seat, and after sending the boy to the vil- 
lage school he sought to turn him to his own profession. But 
there was a stratum of the wayward and the unconventional in 
Riley even from the first. The professions and the ordinary oc- 



THE LATER POETS 325 

cupations open to youth did not appeal to the ima^native lad. 
He learned the trade of sign-paint ingr and then for a year 
traveled with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. 
Following this picturesque experience came three or four years 
as a traveling entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory 
newspaper work, and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady posi- 
tion on the Indianapolis Journal. His recognition as a poet came 
in the mid eighties, and following it came a long period on the 
lecture circuit, reading his own productions, at one time working 
in conjunction with Eugene Field and Edgar W. Nye, — "Bill 
Nye.;' 

His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and jour- 
nalistic in origin. "I was always trj-ing to write of the kind of 
people I knew and especially to write verse that I could read just 
as if it were being spoken for the first time." And again, "I 
always took naturally to anything theatrical."^ For years the 
newspaper was his only medium. He contributed to most of the 
Indiana journals with pseudonyms ranging all the way from 
"Edym" to "Jay Wliitt" and "Benjamin F. Johnson of 
Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these for 
the Indianapolis Journal that he first became known beyond the 
confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that osten- 
sibly were contributed by a crude farmer from a back country 
was not particularly original. Lowell had used it and Artenms 
Ward. Moreover, the fiction of accompanying these poems with 
editorial comment and specimen letters from the author was as 
old at least as The Bigloiv Papers, but there was a Western, Pike 
County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson material. The 
first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied by material 
like this: 

Mr. Johnson thoug'htfully informs us that he is "no edjucatcd man." 
but that he has, "from childhood up tcl old enu<;h to vote. aUus wrote 
more or less poetry, as many of an albun in the neprhborhood can 
testify." Again, he says that he vnrites "from the hart out"; and there 
is a touch of genuine pathos in the frank avowal, "Thare is times when 
I write the tears rolls down my cheeks." 

The poems that followed,— "Thoughts fer the Discura^d 
Farmer," "When the Frost is on the Punkin," "Wortermelon 
Time," and the others— were written primarily as humorous 

2 McVUire's Magazine, 2:222, 



326 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

exercises just as Browne had written his first Artemus Ward con- 
tributions. There is a histrionic element about them that must 
not be overlooked. The author is playing a part. Riley, we 
know, had, at least in his youth, very little sympathy with farm 
life and very little knowledge of it : he was simply impersonating 
an ignorant old farmer. The dialect does not ring true. There 
never has been a time, for instance, when ' ' ministratin ' " for 
ministering, " f amiliously " for familiarly, ''resignated" for re- 
signed, and * * when the army broke out ' ' for when the war broke 
out, have been used in Indiana save by those with whom they are 
individual peculiarities. He is simply reporting the ignorance of 
one old man in the Artemus Ward fashion. Dialect with him 
is the record of a town man 's mimicry of country crudeness. It 
is conventional rather than realistic. It is a humorous device 
like A. Ward's cacography. The first Johnson annotation will 
illustrate : 

Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone County, who considers the Journal a 
"very valubul" newspaper, writes to inclose us an original poem, de- 
siring that we kindly accept it for publication, as "many neghbors 
and friends is astin' him to have the same struck off." 

He issued the series at his own expense in 1883 with the title 
The Old Swimmin'-Eole and 'Leven More Poems hij Benj. F. 
Johnson, of Boone, and he continued the masquerade until after 
the publication of Afterwhiles in 1887. After the great vogue of 
this later volume he began to publish voluminously until his 
final collected edition numbered fourteen volumes. 

Riley not only inherited Will Carleton's public entire, but he 
added to it very considerably. He too dealt freely in sentiment 
and he too wrote always with vocal interpretation in mind. Un- 
doubtedly the wide vogue of his poems has come largely from 
this element. People have always enjoyed hearing the poems 
read with an appropriate acting out of the part more than they 
have enjoyed reading them for themselves. The poems, more 
over, appeared in what may be called the old homestead perioa 
in America. Denman Thompson first brought out his Joshua 
Whitcotnh in 1875 and his The Old Homestead in 1886. Riley 
found a public doubly prepared. He revived old memories — 
the word "old" is almost a mannerism with him: "The Old 
S wimmin '-Hole, " " Old Fashioned Roses, " " The Old Hay-Mow, ' ' 
"The Old Trundle Bed," "Out to Old Aunt Mary's," "The 



THE LATER POETS 327 

Boys of the Old Glee Club," "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," etc. 
Especially did he appeal to those whose childhood had been 
spent in the country. 

Finally, he added to Carleton's devices a metrical facility and 
a jigging melody that is perhaps his most original contribution 
to the period. More than any one else Riley is responsible for 
the modern newspaper type of ballad that is to poetry what rag- 
time is to music. There is a fatal facility to such a melody as, 

Old wortennelon time is a-comin* round again, 

And there ain't no man a-Iivin' any tickleder 'n me, 

Fer the way I hanker after wortenuelons is a sin — 
Which is the why and wharefore, as you can plainly see. 

Or this, 

I ain't, ner don't p'tend to be. 
Much posted on philosofy; 
But thare is times, when all alone, 
I work out idees of my own. 
And of these same thare is a few 
I 'd like to jest refer to you — 
Pervidiii' that you don't object 
To listen elos't and rickoUect. 

In his preference for native themes and homely, unliterary 
treatment of seemingly unpoetic material he continued the work 
of the Pike County balladists. As the Nation, reviewing his Old 
Fashioned Roses, expressed it, he finds pleasure in "some of the 
coarser California flavors." His own standards for poetry he has 
given clearly, and they are in full accord with the spirit of the 
period : 

The poems here at home ! — Who '11 write 'em down, 
Jes' as they air — in Countiy and in Town? — 
Sowed thick as clods is 'crost the fields and lanes, 
Er these-'ere little hop-toads when it rains!— 
Who '11 "voice" 'em ? as I heerd a feller say 
'At speechified on Freedom, t'other day, 
And soared the Eagle tel' it 'peared to me, 
She was n't bigger 'n a bumblebee ! 

What We want, as I sense it, in the line 
0' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine — 
Somepin' with live-stock in it, and outdoors. 
And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores: 
Putt weeds in — pizen-vines, and underbresh. 



328 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

As well as Johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh 

And sassy-like! — and groun'-squir'ls, — yes, and "We," 

As sayin' is, — "We, Us and Company !" 

But one cannot be sure of him. He is an entertainer, an actor, 
a mimicker. Does his material really come ''from the hart out" 
or is he giving, what one always suspects, only excellent vaude- 
ville? Even in his most pathetic moments we catch for an in- 
stant, or we feel that we do, a glimpse of the suave face of the 
platform entertainer. 

Once in a while his childhood lyrics ring true. A little note 
of true pathos like this from Poems Here at Home is worth a 
library of The Flying Islands of the Night and of his other 
voluminous echoes of Alice in Wonderland: 

Let me come in where you sit weeping, — aye, 
Let me, who have not any child to die, 
Weep with you for the little one whose love 
I have known nothing of. 

The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed 
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used 
To kiss. — Such arms — such hands I never knew. 
May I not weep with you? 

Fain would I be of service — say some thing. 
Between the tears, that would be comforting, — 
But ah ! so sadder than yourselves am I, 
Who have no child to die. 

Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as arti- 
ficial and, on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striv- 
ing for effect — he is an entertainer who knows his audience 
and who is never for a moment dull. He has little of insight, 
little knowledge of the deeps of life and the human soul, little 
of message, and he wrote enormously too much. He must be 
rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an entertainer. 

His influence has been great, A whole school of imitators has 
sprung up about him, the most of whom have perished with the 
papers to which they have contributed. The strongest of them 
all undoubtedly was Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911) whose Back 
Country Poems were genuine and distinctive. Drummond's 
Habitant ballads, which rank with the strongest dialect poetry 
of the century, belong to Canadian rather than American 
literature. Stedman 's praise of them is none too high : ' ' Most 
of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new 



THE LATER POETS 329 

thing in an old way. Dr. Dnimraond has achieved the truest 
of lyrical successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new 
way. His poems are idyls as true as those of Theocritus or 
Burns or our own poet of The Biglow Papers"^ 

III 

Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many 
ways, was Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West 
and the culture of the East met in strange confusion. Though 
of Western origin — he was bom at St. Louis in 1850 — he spent 
the formative years of his life between six and nineteen with 
his father's relatives at Amherst, Massachusetts. He completed 
a year at Williams College, then, called West by the death of his 
father, whose law practice at St. Louis had been distinctive, he 
was put by his guardian into Knox College. After a year he 
was transferred to the University of jMissouri, but coming of 
age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's 
estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to 
leave college and travel in Europe. Accordingly, to quote liis 
own words, he spent "six months and [his] patrimony in France, 
Italy, Ireland, and England." 

As a general rule one should quote the autobiographical state- 
ments of Eugene Field with extreme caution, but one can trust 
this bit of his "Auto-analysis": 

In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. 
In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Conistock of 
St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight 
children — three daughtei-s and five sons. 

My newspaper connections have been as follows: 1S75-76, city edi- 
tor of the St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette; 187G-80, editorial writer on the 
St. Louis Journal and St. Louis Times-Journal; 18S0-S1, nianaping 
editor of the Kansas City Times; 1881-83, uianajrinj: editor of the Den- 
ver Tribune. Since 1883 I have been a contributor to the Chicago 
Record (formerly Morning News).* 

His success with the Denver Tribune, to which he contributed 
such widely copied work as that published in his first thin vol- 
ume, The Tribune Primer (1882), attracted attention. He be- 
gan to receive offers from Eastern papers, one at least from 

3Lt/e of Stedman, ii:208. 

4 Thompson's Eugene Field, ii:236. 



330 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Dana, editor of the New York Sun, but it was not until Melville 
E. Stone offered him the humorous column of his paper, the 
Cliicago News, that Field decided to turn eastward. He had 
begun to dream of a literary career and this dream, always a 
vague one, for he was chained by poverty to a tyrannical pro- 
fession, seemed more possible in a less tense atmosphere than 
that of the Western mining center. Arriving at Chicago in 1883, 
he set out to make his new column a thing with distinction. 
Flats and Sharps was the name he gave it, and into it he poured 
a melange of all things: poetry in every key, paragraphs on all 
subjects, parodies, hoaxes, mock reviews, pseudo news, personals, 
jokes — everything. He threw himself completely into the thing: 
it became his life work; "practically everything he ever wrote 
appeared at one time or another in that column. ' ' 

But newspaper humor usually perishes with the flimsy leaves 
upon which it is recorded. Not until Field had written "Little 
Boy Blue" in 1887 did he become at all known to the reading 
public. The publication of the popular editions of A Little 
Book of Profitable Tales and A Little Book of Wester7i Verse in 
1890, only five years before his death, marks, perhaps, the time 
of his general acceptation as a writer. Hardly had the public 
learned to know him before they were called upon to mourn his 
early death. Indeed, the work by which he is now best known 
was done almost all of it in the last six or seven years of his life. 
It was only in this brief later period that he was a "biblio- 
maniac" or a lover of Horace or a student of the old English 
ballads. 

One must classify Eugene Field first of all as a humorist, one 
of the leading figures in that nondescript school of newspaper 
comedians that has played such a part in the history of the 
period. To a personality as high spirited and as whimsical as 
Artemus "Ward's he added the brilliancy of a Locker-Lampson 
and the improvidence of a Goldsmith as well as the kindly heart. 
Seriousness seemed foreign to his nature : his life was a perpetual 
series of hoaxes and practical jokes and hilarious sallies. No one 
has surpassed him in the making of parodies, of rollicking para- 
phrases and adaptations, in skilful blendings of modern and 
antique, in clever minglings of seriousness and humor. He was 
a maker of brilliant trifles and sparkling non sequiturs. His 
irreverence is really startling at times. He can make the Odes 



THE LATER POETS 331 

of Horace seem fit material for the funny column of a Chicago 
daily newspaper : 

Boy, I detest the Persian pomp; 

I hate those linden-bark devices; 
And as for roses, holy Moses! 

They can't be got at living prices! 
Myrtle is good enough for us, — 

For you, as bearer of my flagon; 
For me, supine beneath this vine, 

Doing my best to get a jag on ! 

He is boon companion of the old Sabine poet. He slaps him on 
the back and invites him to all kinds of costly revelr\% assuring 
him that Maecenas will pay the freight. And Horace by no 
means takes offense. He is a congenial soul. 

I might discourse 

Till I was hoarse 
Upon the cruelties of Venus; 

'T were waste of time 

As well as rime, 
For you 've been there yourself, Maecenas ! 

In the presence of such an incorrigible joker the reader feels 
always that he must be on his guard. One is never safe. Leaf- 
ing the pages of the large collected edition of the poems, glanc- 
ing over the Bret Harte echoes like "Casey's Table D'llote," 
smiling at such outrageous nonsense as "The Little Peach" and 
"The Onion Tart," one suddenly draws a sharp breath. At last 
the heart of Eugene Field : 

Upon a mountain height, far from the sea, 

I found a shell, 
And to my listening ear the lonely thing 
Ever a song of ocean seemed to sing, 

Ever a tale of ocean seemed to tell. 

Strange, was it not? Far from its native deep, 

One song it sang, — 
Sang of the awful mysteries of the tide, 
Sang of the misty sea, profound and wide, — 

Ever with echoes of the ocean rang. 

And as the shell upon the mountain height 

Sings of the sea, 
So do I ever, leagues and leagues away,— 
So do I ever, wandering where I may,— 

Sing, my home! sing, my home! of thee. 



332 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

A lyric worthy of any anthology. Yet one quickly finds that it 
is not Eugene Field at all. He wrote it deliberately as a hoax, 
a practical joke on Modjeska, who all the rest of her life was 
obliged to deny the authorship which Field had cunningly fas- 
tened upon her. The case is typical. Like Riley, the man is 
making copy. He uses pathos and sentiment and the most sacred 
things as literary capital. One wonders where one can draw 
the line. Was he really sincere in his child lyrics and his biblio- 
maniac writings or was he cleverly playing a part ? 

In criticizing Field one must remember the essential imma- 
turity of the man. His frequent artificiality and his lack of sin- 
cerity came from his boyislmess and his high spirits. He looked 
at life from the angle of mischievous boyhood. Moreover, he 
wrote always at the high tension of the newspaper office, for a 
thing that had no memory, a column that had but one demand — 
more! It bred in him what may be denominated, perhaps, the 
ephemeral habit. He was all his life a man preeminently and 
predominatingly of the present moment, and thus he stands a 
type of the literary creator that was to follow him. 

For Field more than any other writer of the period illustrates 
the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and 
changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field's voluminous 
product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. 
He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his 
books not at all with book intent — he made them up from news- 
paper fragments. He wrote always a timely thing to the people, 
a thing growing out of the present moment for the people to read, 
making palatable for them even Horace and the severer classics. 
He was thus one of the leading forces in what may be called 
that democratizing of literature for which the period so largely 
stands. 

He has been given a place far beyond his real deserts. The 
sentiment of "Little Boy Blue" and the other child lyrics, the 
whimsical fun and high spirits of his comic verse, endeared him 
to the public that enjoyed Riley. Then his whimsical, Gold- 
smith-like personality helped his fame, as did also his death, 
since it followed so quickly his late discovery by the reading 
public that it gave the impression he had been removed like 
Keats at the very opening of his career. He must be rated, 
however, not for what he wrote, though a few pieces, like his 



THE LATER POETS 333 

child lyrics and his bibliomaniac ballads, will continue long in 
the anthologies, but for the influence he exerted. He was a 
pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization 
of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will 
make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter. 

IV 

In his own estimation Field was distinctively a "Western poet ; 
he gave to his poetry the name ' ' Western verse ' ' ; and he refused 
the offers of Dana and others because he was not at all in sym- 
pathy with the Eastern ideals. To (luote his biographer, he felt 
that Chicago "was as far East as he could make his home with- 
out coming within the influence of those social and literary 
conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine literary 
flavor out of our literature. ' ' ^ 

What New York might have made of Field we may learn, per- 
haps, from the career of Henry Cuyler Bunner, for nearly twenty 
years the most brilliant poetic wit in the East. He, too, had 
approached literature from the journalistic entrance. At eight- 
een he had left school to begin an apprenticeship on the brilliant 
but short-lived Arcadian, and at twenty-two he was editor of the 
newly established Puck, a position that he held until his death 
at forty-one. 

No man ever turned off verse and prose with more facility or 
in greater quantity. "The staff of the paper was very small, 
and little money could be spent for outside contributions; and 
there were many weeks when nearly half the whole number was 
written by Bunner."^ Like Field, he could write a poem while 
the office boy, who had brought the order, stood waiting for tiie 
copy to carry back with him. For more than ten years he fur- 
nished nearly all the humorous verse for the periodical, besides 
numberless paragraphs, short stories, and editorials. But he 
was more fastidious than Field, inasmuch as he kept this jour- 
nalistic material strictly unconnected with his name. It was a 
thing alone of the editorial office, no more to be mingled with 
his more literary product than Charles Lamb's India office book.s 
were to be brought into his Elia essays. The greater number of 
those who laughed over the verses of the whimsical "V. Hugo 

B Thompson, Eugene Field, i : 193. 

• Brander Matthews, The Flistorical yorel, 173. 



334 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Dusenberry, professional poet," never once dreamed that he was 
H. C. Bunner, author of the exquisite lyrics in Airs from Ar- 
cady and Row en, and the carefully wrought stories — French in 
their atmosphere and their artistic finish — Short Sixes and Love 
in Old Cloathes. The skilful parodies and timely renderings, the 
quips and puns — all the voluminous melange, indeed, of the 
poetic Yorick — lie buried now in the files of Puck. Their cre- 
ator refused to republish them, and we to-day can but yield to 
his wish and judge him only by that which he himself selected 
for permanence. 

Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of 
vers de societS, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, 
refined, faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flut- 
ter and dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled 
in the program while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams 
over the tea-cups, conceits for a fan, amours de voyage, lines 
written on the menu, amoretti, valentines — these are his work, 
and no one has done them more daintily or with more skill of 
touch. Trifles they are, to be sure, yet Bunner, like every mas- 
ter of the form, makes of them more than trifles. A hint of 
tears there may be, the faintest breath of irony, the suspicion, 
vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness or philosophy, 
the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet a flash here 
and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in "Betrothed" 
and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in 
the Days when Madison was President." 

The French forms, imported echoes of Dobson and Lang and 
Gosse — ballades, rondels, rondeaux, and the like, that so be- 
witched the younger poets of the mid-eighties — found in Bunner 
perhaps their most skilful American devotee. Perhaps no one 
but he has ever succeeded in English with the chant royal, or has 
found it possible to throw into that most trivial of all verse 
forms, triolets, a throb of life, as in "A Pitcher of Mignonette": 

A pitcher of mignonette 

In a tenement's highest casement: 
Queer sort of flower-pot — yet 
That pitcher of mignonette 
Is a garden in heaven set. 

To the Httle sick child in the basement — 
The pitcher of mignonette, 

In the tenement's highest casement. 



THE LATER POETS 335 

The period, especially in its later years, has run abundantly 
to these trivial, though difficult, forms of verse. As poetry ceased 
more and more to be a thing of vision and compelling power, 
it became more and more a thing of daintiness and brilliancy. 
The American Lyra Elegantiarum for the period has been more 
sparkling and abundant than the English, more even than the 
French. John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) belongs almost wholly 
to the days of Holmes and Lowell, but the greater number of 
our trivial makers fall into the group that was active during the 
closing quarter of the century. To mention all of them would 
be to call the roll of the younger American poets. Perhaps the 
most noteworthy, however, are Mary Mapes Dodge (1838-1905), 
whose dainty and tender "The Minuet" gives her a place in 
the choir; James Jeffrey Roche (1847-1908); Walter Learned 
(1847 ) ; Richard Kendall Munkittrick (1853-1911) ; Sam- 
uel Minturn Peck (1854 ), in many respects the most 

delightful of the group; Clinton Scollard (1860 ); John 

Kendrick Bangs (1862 ), and such modern instances as 

Oliver Herford, Gelett Burgess, and Carolyn Wells.^ One 
might, indeed, collect a notable anthology of vers de societe from 
the files of Life alone. 



A large amount of the poetry of the era has been written by 
women. After the war their thin volumes, bound in creamy 
vellum and daintily tinted cloth, began more and more to fill the 
book tables, until reviewers no longer could give separate notice 
to them, but must consider the poets of a month in groups of 
ten or tw^elve. The quality of the feminine product was high 
enough to find place in the most exclusive monthlies, and the 
quantity published was surprising. The Atlantic Monthly, for 
instance, during the decade from 1870 published 108 poems by 
Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Aldrich, and 450 
other poems, and of the latter 201 were by women. The femi- 
nine novelists and short story writers, so conspicuous during all 
the period, were, indeed, almost all poets, some of them volumi- 
nous. One may note the names not only of the older group- 
Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. SpoflFord, Miss 
^oolson— but of such later writers as Mrs. Freeman, Alice 
Brown. ^Mrs. Deland, and IMrs. Riggs. 



336 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Very little of this mass of poetry has been strong enough to 
demand republication from the dainty volumes in which it first 
appeared. It has been smooth and often melodious, but for the 
most part it has been conventional. Prevailingly it has been 
short lyric song in minor key, gentle and sentimental — graceful 
exercises in verse rather than voices from a soul stirred to utter- 
ance and caring not. In a sonneteering age this feminine con- 
tingent has swelled enormously the volume of sonnets. Helen 
Hunt Jackson's thin volume contains one hundred, Louise 
Chandler Moulton's one hundred and thirty-one, yet in both 
collections occurs no sonnet one would dream of adding to the 
select few that undoubtedly are worth while. Here and there 
in Mrs. Jackson a bit of work like ''Poppies on the Wheat," 
"Glimpses," "Vashti," that rises, perhaps, a little above the 
level monotony of the times, but in the vital seventies in America 
why should one have published sonnets ? Even as she was shap- 
ing them, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was demanding in major 
key, 

How long, and yet how long, 
Our leaders will we hail from over seas, 
Masters and kings from feudal monarchies, 

And mock their ancient song 
With echoes weak of foreign melodies? 

This fresh young world I see, 
With heroes, cities, legends of her own ; 
With a new race of men, and overblown 

By winds from sea to sea. 
Decked with the majesty of every zone. 

The distant siren-song 
Of the green island in the eastern sea, 
Is not the lay for this new ehivaliy. 

It is not free and strong 
To chant on prairies 'neath this brilliant sky. 

The echo faints and fails; 
It suiteth not, upon this western plain, 
Our voice or spirit; we should stir again 

The wilderness, and make the vales 
Resound unto a yet unheard-of strain. 

The life of Emma Lazarus was brief and externally eventless. 
Born in New York City in a home of refinement and wealth, as 



THE LATER POETS 337 

a child precocious, inclined to seriousness, intense, she passed 
her early life among books rather than among companions. At 
seventeen she had issued a collection of verses, melancholy even 
above the usual poetry of women, valueless utterly ; then at 
twenty-one she had published again, now a long poem, Greek in 
its chaste beauty, Admetus, inscribed "To My Friend Ralph 
Waldo Emerson," Two forces were contending, even as they 
had contended in Heine. In Paris in later years before the 
Venus of the Louvre she wrote a sonnet, and, miracle among 
modern sonnets, it is impassioned, unfettered, alive — a woman's 
soul: 

... I saw not her alone, 

Serenely poised on her world-worshiped throne, 

As when she guided once her dove-drawn car, — 

But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, 

Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. 

Here Heine wept ! Here still he weeps anew, 

Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, 

"WTiile mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain. 

For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain. 

Until 1876 quiet emotion, Hellenic beauty, romance without 
passion. "Tannhauser" suggests William Morris and The 
Earthly Paradise. Then came The Spagnioleito, a tense drama, 
which showed for the first time the latent embers in her Hebraic 
soul. It needed but a breath to kindle them and that breath 
came with reports of the Jewish massacres of 1879. No more 
of Hellenism. With Liebhaid in The Dance of Death, that most 
tense drama in American literature, she could cry out : 

No more of that. 
I am all Israel's now — till this cloud pass, 
I have no thought, no passion, no desire, 
Save for my people. 

Henceforth fiery lyrics of denunciation, rallying cries, trans- 
lations of Hebrew prophets, songs of encouragement and cheer, 
as "The Crowing of the Red Cock," "In Exile," "The New 
Ezekiel," "The Valley of Baca," and, most Hebraic of all, "The 
Banner of the Jew," with its ringing lines: 

Oh, for Jerusalem's trumpet now, 
To blow a blast of shattering power. 



338 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

To wake the sleepers high and low, 

And rouse them to the urgent hour! 
No hand for vengeance — but to save, 
A million naked swords should wave. 

The fire was too intense for the frail, sensitive body. Sud- 
denly, like Heine, she was on a "mattress grave," powerless, 
though never so eager, never so quivering with burning message. 
She died at thirty-eight. 

No more impetuous and Hebraic lines in the literature of the 
period than hers. Often she achieved a distinction of phrase 
and an inevitableness of word and of rhythm denied to all but 
the truest of poets. No other American woman has surpassed 
her in passion, in genuineness of emotion, in pure lyric effect. 

Other impassioned singers there have been. Ella Wheeler 

Wilcox (1855 ) wrote of love with lyric abandon, but she 

mingled too much of sentimentality and all too much of posing 
and of tawdriness. Anne Reeve Aldrich (1866-1892) in Songs 
Ahout Life, Love, and Death struck deeper notes, and Elizabeth 
Akers Allen (1832-1911), though she wrote exceedingly much 
in the key of the conventional mid-century sadness and longing, 
yet now and then sent forth lyrics that laid bare her woman's 
soul. 

One may not dismiss so confidently Celia Thaxter, the poet 
of the Isles of Shoals. She was, to be sure, no dominating voice 
in the period, no poet with whom distinction of phrase and 
poetic melody were native and spontaneous. Rather was she of 
the Jean Ingelow type, feminine, domestic, tremulous with senti- 
ment. In one area, however, she commanded : her poetry of the 
sea was autochthonic, and it sprang not from books, but from her 
life. Her childhood she had passed in the seclusion of the light- 
house keeper's home on White Island, a storm-beaten rock off 
the New Hampshire coast. For months at a time no visitors 
came save the sea gulls and the migrating birds. Her com- 
panion through all her young girlhood was the ocean. She grew 
to know intimately all its thousand moods, the sea gardens along 
the rocks at low tide, the ships that hovered like clouds on the 
horizon, the flowers in the rock crannies, the sandpipers that 
flitted before her on the beach. The birds that flew against the 
lantern of the lighthouse on migrating nights furnished the first 
tragedy of her life : 



THE LATER POETS 339 

Many a May morning have I wandered about the rock at the foot 
of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swal- 
lows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many-colored warblers 
and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, 
even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oreole, and many 
more besides — enough to break the heart of a small child to think of! ^ 

No ordinary child, this lonely little islander. The lure of the 
sea possessed her, the terror of its storms, the beauty of its 
summer moods, the multitudinous variety of its voice. "Many 
a summer morning have I crept out of the still house before any 
one was awake, and, wrapping myself closely from the chill wind 
of dawn, climbed to the top of the high cliff called the Ilrad 
to watch the sunrise." It was this communion with the sea that 
awoke the poet soul within her : 

Ever I longed to speak these things that made life so sweet, to speak 
the wind, the cloud, the bird's fiight, the sea's murmur. A vain long- 
ing! I might as well have sighed for the mighty pencil of Michel 
Angelo to wield in my impotent child's hand. Better to "hush and 
bless one's self with silence"; but ever the wish grew. Facing the July 
sunsets, deep red and golden through and through, or watching the 
summer nortliern lights — battalions of brilliant streamei-s, advancing and 
retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like fierj' veils 
before the stars; or when the fog bow spanned the silver mist of 
morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in a golden haze of 
noon; in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Na- 
ture held me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be 
silent any longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad 
voices, only aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, how- 
ever feeble and broken the notes might be.^ 

The first poem of hers to gain the ear of the public was "Land- 
Locked," accepted by Lowell and published in the Atlantic, 
March, 1861. Its closing stanzas ring with sincerity. It is the 
voice of every inland dweller whose youth has been spent by 
the sea: 

Neither am I ungrateful ; but I dream 
Deliciously how twilight falls to-night 
Over the glimmering water, how the light 

Dies blissfully away, until I seem 

T Among the Isles of f^hoals, 111. 
sibid., 141. 



340 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek. 
To catch the sound of dusky flapping sail 
And dip of oars, and voices on the gale 

Afar off, calling low— my name they speak! 

Earth! thy summer song of joy may soar 
Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave 
The sad, caressing murmur of the wave 

That breaks in tender music on the shore. 

About all her poetry of the sea there are genuineness and 
truth to experience. All of them are fragments of autobiog- 
raphy: "Ofe Shore," "The Wreck of the Pocahontas," "The 
Sandpiper," "Watching," "At the Breakers' Edge," "The 
Watch of Boon Island," "Leviathan" — all of them have in them 
the heart of the northern Atlantic. They are not deep like 
Whitman's mighty voicings, but they are the cry of one who 
knew and loved the sea better than any other American who has 
ever written about it. 

Her prose study Among the Isles of Shoals, overflorid though 
it may be in places, is nevertheless one of the notable books of 
the period. Nowhere may one find so complete a picture of the 
northern ocean in all its moods and aspects. Its pictures of 
storm and wreck, its glimpses of the tense and hazardous life 
of dwellers by the ocean, its disclosings of the mystery and the 
subtle lure of the sea, stir one at times like the deeper notes of 
poetry. 

One of the most perplexing of later poetic problems came in 
1890 with the publication by Thomas Wentworth Higginson of 
the posthumous poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). The 
explanation by Higginson that the poet was a daughter of the 
treasurer of Amherst College, that she was a recluse "literally 
spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep 
and many more years during which her walks were strictly 
limited to her father's grounds," and that she had written 
"verses in great abundance," refusing, however, save in three 
or four instances, to allow any of them to be published, that she 
wrote "absolutely without thought of publication, and solely by 
way of expression of the writer 's own mind, ' ' — all this aroused 
curiosity. At last one might see, perchance, a woman's soul. 

The poems are disappointing. Critics have echoed Higgin- 
son, until Emily Dickinson has figured, often at length, in all 



THE LATER POETS 341 

the later histories and anthologies, but it is becoming clear tliat 
she was overrated. To compare her eccentric fragments with 
Blake's elfin wilduess is ridiculous. They are mere conceits, 
vague jottings of a brooding mind; they are crudely wrought, 
and, like their author's letters, which were given to the public 
later, they are colorless and for the most part lifeless. They 
reveal little either of Emily Dickinson or of human life gen- 
erally. They should have been allowed to perish as their author 
intended. 

Most of the feminine poets of the later generation have been 
over-literary. There is grace and finish in the work of Louise 

Imogen Guiney (1861 ), but nowhere in all her carefully 

selected final volume, Happy Ending, are there lines that sud- 
denly send the pulses into quicker beat and haunt the memory. 
It is beautiful, but it is of a piece with ten thousand other beau- 
tiful pieces; there is nothing to compel the reader, nothing to 
lead him into fresh fields. Of all too many of the later feminine 
poets may we say this: of Ina Donna Coolbrith, for instance, and 

Helen Gray Cone (1859 ), Dora Read Goodale (1866—), 

Katharine Lee Bates (1859 ). 

Only one other feminine singer has done work tliat compels 

attention, Edith Matilda Thomas (1854 ). Only by birth 

and rearing was she of Ohio. To read her poems is to be trans- 
ported into that no-man's land which so many poets have called 
Aready. She is more Greek than American. She has reacted 
little upon her time, and she might be dismissed with mere men- 
tion were there not in many of her poems a lyric distinction that 
has been rare in American poetry. A fragment from her work 
will make this clearer than exposition. Here, for instance, are 
the opening stanzas of "Syrinx": 

Come forth, too timid spirit of the reed! 

Leave thy plashed coverts and elusions shy, 
And find delight at large in grove and mead. 

No ambushed harm, no wanton's peerinu: eye. 
The shepherd's uncouth god thou needst not fear- 
Pan has not passed this way for many a year. 

'Tis but the vagrant wind that makes thee start. 
The pleasure-loving south, the freshening west; 

The willow's woven veil they softly part, 
To fan the lily on the stream's wann breast •. 



342 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

No ruder stir, no footstep pressing near — 
Pan has not passed this way for many a year. 

Unlooked-for music indeed from the banks of the Ohio. Her 
muse was remote, unimpassioned, classical, yet no lyrist of the 
period has had more of the divine poetic gift of expression. She 
seems curiously out of place in the headlong West m those 
stormy closing years of the nineteenth century. 



Belated singers of the mid-century music were Richard Watson 
Gilder (1844-1909), Edward Roland Sill (1841-1887), George 

E. Woodberry (1855 ), and Henry Van Dyke ri852 ), 

all of them poets like Miss Thomas, who were remote from their 
era, workers in art and beauty rather than voices and leaders. 

One may pause long with Gilder. No other man of his gen- 
eration did so much to turn the direction of the period and to 
determine its nature. As managing editor of Scrihner's 
Monthly from the first number to the last, and then after the 
death of Holland, editor of the Century Magazine, he exerted 
for twenty-eight years an influence upon American letters that 
cannot be overestimated. In a way he is the central literary 
figure of the period, even more so than Dr. Holland. More than 
any one else he was responsible for the revolution in magazine 
management for which the period stands, and more than any 
one else he helped to gather the new school of novelists and 
short story writers and poets that made the era distinctive. He 
was the James T. Fields of the national period. 

He was first of all an editor, then he was a humanitarian, 
active in all movements for city betterment, then he was a poet. 
Beginning with The New Bay in 1875, he issued many small 
volumes of delicate verse, mystical often in tone, always serious, 
always artistic. That he knew the divine commission of the 
poet he revealed in his volume The Celestial Passion, 1878: 

Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot: 

Mid sounds of war — in halcyon times of peace — 

To strike the ringing lyre and not to cease; 

In hours of general happiness to swell 

The common joy; and when the people cry 

With piteous voice loud to the pitiless sky, 

'Tis his to frame the universal prayer 

And breathe the balm of song upon the accursed air? 



THE LATER POETS 343 

But he himself seemed not bound by this ideal of the poet. His 
carefully wrought verses add little that is new, and little that 
may be understood by those for whom a poet should sing. They 
lack substance, the Zeitgeist, masculinity. Stedman could say 
that they are "marked by the mystical beauty, intense emotion, 
and psychological emotion of the elect ilhiminati," but the criti- 
cism, even were it true, was condemnatory. Gilder's definition 
did not mention the "elect illuminati." 

It is depressing to think that this most virile of men, who 
was the tireless leader of his generation in so many beneficent 
fields of activity, must be judged in the coming periods solely 
by this volume of poems. For classic poetry was not his life- 
work, not his enthusiasm, not himself — it was a rarely furnished 
room in the heart of his home, rather, where at times he might 
retire from the tumidt and enjoy the beauty he had gathered 
in the realms of gold. He was not a poet, singing inevitable 
lines, spontaneous and inspired. His poems lacked lyric dis- 
tinction, that compelling quality that sinks a poem into the 
reader's soul, and, lacking it, they have little hope for perma- 
nence. They are finished always and coldly beautiful, but finish 
and beauty are not enough. So it is with George E. Wood- 
berry's polished work, and Father Tabb's. It is not vital with 
the life of an epoch, it is not the voice of a soul deeply stirred 
with a new and compelling message. All too often it has come 
from deliberate effort; it is a mere performance. 

With the work of Edward Rowland Sill one must be less posi- 
tive. Here we find conflict, reaction, spontaneous expression. 
He was by no means a voice of his era, a robust shouter like 
Whitman and Miller : he was a gentle, retiring soul who felt out 
of place in his generation. Seriousness had come to him as a 
birthright. Behind him were long lines of Connecticut Puri- 
tans. He was frail, moreover, of physique, with a shrinking 
that was almost feminine from all that was discordant and 
assertive. After his graduation at Yale, the poet of his class, 
in 1861, he was unable to settle upon a profession. He at- 
tempted theology, and then, disillusioned, for bare support he 
drifted into teaching. Year after year passed with the problem 
unsettled, until he awoke to find that teaching was to be his life- 
work. He had hidden among the children in the schoolroom, 
and the things he had dreamed over had passed him by. His 



344 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

external biography is largely a list of schools and positions. 
At forty-six he died. 

Poetry to Sill was a peculiarly personal thing, almost as much 
so as it was to Emily Dickinson, He was not eager to publish, 
and much that he did send to the magazines bore other names 
than his own. He wrote, as Thoreau wrote his journal, with 
simple directness for himself and the gods, and as a result we 
have in his work the inner history of a human soul. There is 
no artificiality, no sentimental vaporings, no posing for effect. 
It is not art ; it is life. 

Here is poetry of struggle, poetry not of the spirit of an 
epoch but of the life of an individual at odds with the epoch, 
introspective, personal. One thinks of Clough, who also was 
a teacher, a gentle soul oppressed with doubts and fears, a strug- 
gler in the darkness of the late nineteenth century. But Sill 
was less masculine than Clough. His doubtings are gentle and 
half apologetic. Never is he bitter or excited or impetuous. To 
such robust climaxes as "Say not the Struggle Naught Avail- 
eth" he is incapable of rising: he broods, but he is resigned. 
He exhorts himself deliberately to cheerfulness and faith and 
to heights of manhood where all that is low may fall away. 
Erotic passion has no part in his work. He has deliberately 
conquered it: 

Is my life but Marguerite's ox-eyed flower, 
That I should stand and pluck and fling away, 
One after one, the petal of each hour. 
Like a love-dreamy girl, and only say, 
"Loves me," and "loves me not," and "loves me"'? Nay! 
Let the man's mind awake to manhood's power. 

No poet has shrunk more sensitively from the realistic, ma- 
terial age of which he was a part than Sill. His poems deal 
with the realm of the spirit rather than with the tangible. They 
are without time and place and material basis. One may illus- 
trate with the poems he wrote for Yale gatherings. They are 
colorless: change but the name and they would apply as well 
to Harvard or Princeton. Read in connection with Hovey's 
dramatic, intensely individual Dartmouth poems and they seem 
like beautiful clouds. They are serious, often over-serious, they 
have no trace of humor, they deal with the soul life of one upon 
whom the darkness threatens constantly to fall. 



THE LATER POETS 345 

His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, 
for he was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and 
"Woodberry lacked. Once in a while he made a stanza that ap- 
proaches lyric distinction, as, perhaps, in this final one of "A 
Foolish Wish": 

'T is a child's longing, on the beach at play : 

"Before I go," 
He begs the beckoning mother, "Let me stay 

One shell to throw!" 
'Tis coming night; the great sea cUmbs the shore — 
Ah, let me toss one little pebble more, 

Before I go! 

But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from 
the beauty and purity of his own personality. His own con- 
ception of a poem was, that "coming from a pure and rich 
nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us." 
Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a high place among the 
poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us purer and 
richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life. 
Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold 
their place among the very highest pieces of American reflective 
poetry. 

It was the opinion of Edmund Gosse that the period was nota- 
bly deficient in serious verse," No statement could be more wide 
of the mark; the period has abounded in serious poetry and its 
quality has been high. To consider in detail this mass of poetry, 
however, were to exceed our limits. We can only single out 
one here and there a little more notable than the others — John 
Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890), for instance, with his Celtic fancy 
and his graphic power to depict life in the Southern Seas; 

Maurice Francis Egan (1852 ) and Lloyd Mifflin (1846- 

), makers of beautiful and thoughtful sonnets; S. Weir 

Mitchell (1829-1914), a poet of rare distinction as well as a 
novelist; Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916), maker of mad- 
rigals and joyous lyrics; Charles Warren Stoddard (1825- 
1903), whose songs have a lyric quality that is distinctive, and 
Abram Joseph Ryan (1839-1886), a beautiful and heroic soul, 
who had he written but a single lyric would occupy a high place 

9 The Poems of Madison Cawein. Vol. I. Tntroduction. 



346 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

among American poets. His ''The Conquered Banner" was the 
voice of a people : 

Furl that Banner, softly, slowly! 
Treat it gently — it is holy — 

For it droops above the dead. 
Touch it not — unfold it never — 
Let it droop there, furled forever, 

For its people's hopes are fled. 

VI 

The two most prominent younger poets of the South were 
Robert Burns Wilson (1850-1916) and Madison Cawein (1865- 
1914), both residents of Kentucky, one at Frankfort, the other 
at Louisville, and both contemplative Nature poets who voiced 
but little the spirit of their period. Of the two, Wilson un- 
doubtedly was the most inspired singer, as Cawein was the most 
careful observer of Nature. 

Of Wilson we may say that he was a later Thomas Buchanaii 
Read, a devotee of art, a painter of landscapes and portraits, 
whose work was seen in many distinctive galleries, and in ad- 
dition to this a poet — most pictorial of poets, whose stanzas seem 
like inscriptions for his paintings. Wlien the lyrics "When 
Evening Cometh On" and "June Days" appeared in Harper's 
in 1885, it was felt that a new singer had come. There was dis- 
tinction in the lines, there was restraint, there was more than 
promise, there was already fulfilment. One feels a quality in 
a stanza like this that he may not explain : 

Though all the birds be silent — though 

The fettered stream's soft voice be still, 
And on the leafless bough the snow 

Be rested, marble-like and chill — 
Yet will the fancy build from these 

The transient but well-pleasing dream 
Of leaf and bloom among the trees. 

And sunlight glancing on the stream. 

It has somehow the singing quality that may not be learned, 
that may not be taught. Finer still when there is joined with it 
graphic power that arrests and pleases the eye, and pathos that 
grips hard the heart, as in a lyric like this : 



THE LATER POETS 347 

Such is the death the soldier dies: 
He falls — the column speeds away; 

Upon the dabbled grass he lies, 
His brave heart following, still, the fray. 

The smoke-wraiths drift among the trees, 
The battle storms along the hill; 

The glint of distant arms he sees; 
He hears his comrades shouting still. 

A glimpse of far-borne flags, that fade 
And vanish in the rolling din: 

He knows the sweeping charge is made. 
The cheering lines are closmg in. 

Unmindful of his mortal wound. 
He faintly calls and seeks to rise; 

But weakness drags him to the ground — 
Such is the death the soldier dies. 

Wilson's poetic product was small, but it stands distinctive. 

The work of Cawein has been far more widely trumpeted. He 
had the good fortune to attract the attention of Howells with 
his first book and to be commended by him persistently and with 
no uncertain voice. "There is much that is expressive of the 
new land," Howells wrote in "The Editor's Study," "as well 
as of the young life in its riclily sensuous, boldly achieved pieces 
of color. In him one is sensible (or seems so) of something dif- 
ferent from the beautiful as literary New England or literary 
New York conceived it. He is a fresh strain. " i° He deplored 
the gorgeous excesses of the poems and the touches for merely 
decorative effect, but he defended them as the natural exuber- 
ance of extreme youth. With time they would disappear: un- 
doubtedly a great poet had arisen. Thus encouraged, Cawein 
began upon a poetic career that in single-hearted devotion to the 
lyric muse has been equaled only by Clinton ScoUard. Before 
his death he had issued more than twenty volumes of lyrics and 
his collected work had been published in five thick volumes. 

The final estimate of the poet cannot yet be written. It is too 
soon, but even now one may venture certain predictions. 
Cawein wrote enormously too much, and he wrote all too often 
with merely literary intent. He was not a lyrist born: he liad 

10 Harper's Monthly, May, 1888. 



348 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

little ear for music, and he blended meters and made rimes seem- 
ingly with the eye alone. One can not feel that a passage like 
this, for instance, sang itself spontaneously: 

Seemed that she 
Led me along- a flower-showered lea 
Trammeled with puckered pansy and the pea; 
Where poppies spread great blood-red stain on stain, 
So gorged with sunlight and the honied rain 
Their hearts are weary; roses lavished beams 
Roses, wherein were huddled little dreams 
That laughed coy, sidewise merriment, like dew 
Or from fair fingers fragrant kisses blew. 

There is a straining constantly for the unusual in epithet, a 
seeking for a picturing adjective that shall give verisimilitude 
in an utterly new way. "The songs have all been sung," he 
would seem to argue, "but the picturing adjectives have not 
all been used and the striking conceits." One might open at 
random for an illustration : 

Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold; 
A bullion bulk the wide Ohio lies. 

Up from the glimmering east the full moon swung, 
A golden bubble buoyed zenithward. 

Between the pansy fire of the west, 
And poppy mist of moonrise in the east. 
This heartache will have ceased. 

" It is as if we had another Keats, ' ' says Howells, and in say- 
ing it he touches the fatal weakness of the poet. There is lack 
of virility in great parts of his work, there is lack of definiteness 
and of vigor. He tells nothing new and he adds nothing to the 
old by his telling. Even Baskerville can say, "There is little 
or no Southern, not to say Kentucky, atmosphere in Mr. 
Cawein's poetry. His flowers and birds and rocks and trees do 
not appear to us as objects of the rich, warm Southern nature. 
He frequently mentions the whole register of flowers and birds 
in his poetry — almost, we might say, drags them into his de- 
scriptions by force — but he has not created a warm, genial, 
Southern poetic atmosphere in which they may thrive. ' ' ^^ 

11 Southern Writers, Vol. II, p. 355. 



THE LATER POETS 349 

Nevertheless, it is ouly in his Nature poetry that he is at all 
convincing. He can paint a summer noon, or a summer shower, 
and he can detail minutely the flowers and the mosses and the 
birds in an old fence corner or an old garden. Pictures like this 
have, undoubtedly, a certain kind of value : 

Bubble-like the hollyhocks 

Budded, burst, and flaunted wide 
Gipsy beauty from their stocks; 

Morning-glories, bubble-dyed, 
Swung in honey-hearted flocks. 

Tawny tiger-lilies flung 
if I Doublets slashed with crimson on; 

i Graceful girl slaves, fair and young, 

Like Circassians, in the sun 
Alabaster lilies swung. 

Ah, the droning of the bee 

In his dusty pantaloons. 
Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis; 

In the drowsy afternoons 
Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea. 

Always is he heavy with adjectives, profuse, gorgeous ; always 
is he dreamy and remote. One turns page after page of the 
thick volumes of the collected lyrics to tind some simple human 
bit that came hot from the heart of a poet, some stanza that 
compels quotation, but one gets lost at length in the maze of 
sweetness. If any of his poems are to outlast their generation 
it will be some of the Nature pieces, but landscape studies, flower 
songs, and pretty conceits about bees and birds are thin ma- 
terial of which to make enduring poetry. 

VII 

With Richard Hovey (1864-1900), representative of the poeta 
'^ of the second generation of the National period, our survey 
closes. Hovey was a later Lanier, excited, impetuous, possessed 
by poetry until it ruled all his thinking. Like Lanier, he was 
Gallic of temperament rather than Teutonic. He read enor- 
mously—the Elizabethans, Tennyson, Whitman, the pre- 
Raphaelites, Dobson, Kipling, and later, in France, Paul Ver- 
laine, Maeterlinck, Stephane Mallarme, and all the later symbol- 
ists. After his college course at Dartmouth he was, at brief 



350 AMERICAN LITEEATURE SINCE 1870 

intervals, theological student, newspaper reporter, actor, lecturer 
in Alcott's Concord school of philosophy, and in his last year, 
like Lanier, professor of literature in one of the larger univer- 
sities — Barnard College, New York — yet his one profession all 
his life long was poetry. His facility was marvelous. He 
wrote an elegy of purest Greek type and he added a canto to 
Don Juan; he wrote Arthurian masques and dramas and then 
rollicking Bohemian songs and vers de societe. 

His facility was his weakness. Like Lanier he was too ex- 
cited, too given to improvisation and the blending of meters. 
His dramatic interludes like The Quest of Merlin and Taliesin 
are marvelous in their workmanship, their mastery of all the in- 
tricacies of prosody, but they come near to being void of human 
interest. Lanier dominated his first poem The Laurel and there 
are echoes of Whitman and others in his later work. He ma- 
tured slowly. At his death he had arrived at a point where there 
was promise of creative work of highest distinction. He was 
breaking from his Bohemianism and his excited Swinburnian 
music and was touching his time. His definition of poetry 
makes his early death seem like a tragedy. Of the poet he 
wrote, "It is not his mission to write elegant canzonettas for the 
delectation of the Sybaritic dilettanti, but to comfort the sor- 
rowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed 
and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to 
the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths, all its 
glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe 
into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose mani- 
festation it is. . . . In the appointed work of every people, the 
poets have been the leaders and pioneers. ' ' ^^ 

His most finished work is his elegy on the death of Thomas 
William Parsons, Seaward, which at times has a lyric quality 
that brings it into the company even of Adonais and Thyrsis. 
One is tempted to quote more than a single stanza: 

Far, far, so far, the crying of the surf! 

Still, still, so still, the water in the grass! 
Here on the knoll the crickets in the turf 

And one bold squirrel barking, seek, alas! 
To bring the swarming summer back to me. 

In vain ; my heart is on the salt morass 
Below, that stretches to the sunlit sea. 
^-Dartmouth Magazine, Vol. XX, p. 95. 



THE LATER POETS 351 

His most spontaneous and original outbursts are doubtless his 
Dartmouth lyrics — a series distinctive among college poetry, 
worthy of a place beside Dr. Holmes's Harvard lyrics — and 
his rollicking convivial songs that have in them the very soul 
of good fellowship. There is in all he wrote a Whitman-like 
masculinity. He could make even so conventional a thing as 
a sonnet a thing to stir the blood with : 

"V\nien I am standing on a mountain crest, 

Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, 
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, 

Shouts Avith the winds and sweeps to their foray; 
My heart bounds with the hoi-scs of the sea, 

And plunges in the wild ride of the night, 
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee 

That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to Higbt. 
Ho, love! I laugh aloud for love of you. 

Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather; 
No fretful orchid hot-housed from the dew. 

But hale and hearty as the highland heather. 
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills. 
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills. 

He is the singer of men — of Western men, red-blooded and 
free — the very opposite of Cawein. He wrote songs to be sung 
in barrack rooms and at college reunions — songs of comradeship 
and masculine joy: 

Give a rouse, then, in the Maytirae 

For a life that knows no fear! 
Turn night-time into daytime 

With the sunlight of good cheer! 
For it's always fair weather 
When good fellows get together 
Witli a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear. 

And again this 

Comrades, give a cheer to-night, 

For the dying is with dawn ! 

Oh, to meet the stars together. 

With the silence coming on! 

Greet the end 

As a friend a friend 

When strong men die together. 

His Launcelot and Guenevere cycle, which was to be com- 
plete in nine dramas, only four of which he lived to finish, 



352 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

though undoubtedly the best was yet to come, has in it enough 
of strength to make for itself, fragment as it is, a high place 
in our literature. The dramas are in different key from Ten- 
nyson's. In the Idyls of the King the old legend is domesti- 
cated and the table round is turned into a tea table. Hovey in 
his Marriage of Guenevere and The Birth of Galahad puts virile 
power into his knights, makes of Launcelot the hero of the cycle, 
and gives to Guenevere a reality that is Shakespearian. Few in- 
deed have been the poets of the younger school who have dared 
to plan on so grand a scale or to venture to offer something new 
in a field that has been so thoroughly exploited. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Will Caeleton. (1845-1912.) Poems, 1871; Farm Ballads, 1873; 
Farm Legends, 1875; Young B'olks' Centennial Rhymes, 187G; Farm Fes- 
tivals, 1881; City Ballads, 1885; City Legends, 1889; City Festivals, 1892; 
Rhymes of Our Planet, 1S95; The Old Infant, and Similar Stories, 1896; 
Songs of Two Centuries, 1902; Poems for Young Americans, 1906; In Old 
School Days, 1907; Drifted In, 1907. 

John James Piatt. (1835-1917.) Poems of Two Friends [with 
Howells], 1859; The Nests at Washington [with Sarah Morgan Piatt], 
1864; Poems in Sunshine and Firelight, 1866; Western Windows and 
Other Poems, 1869; Landmarks and Other Poems, 1871; Poems of House 
and Home, 1879; Penciled Fly-Leaves [prose], 1880; Idyls and Lyrics of 
the Ohio Valley, 1884; The Children Out of Doors [with Mrs. Piatt], 
1885; At the Holy Well, 1887; A Book of Gold, 1889; Uttle New-World 
Idyls, 1893; The Ghost's Entry and Other Poems, 1895. 

James Whitcomb Riley. (1849-1916.) The Old Swimmin'-Hole, 
1883; The Boss Girl and Other Sketches, 1886; Afterwhiles, 1887; Pipes 
o' Pan at Zekesbiiry, 1889; Rhymes of Childhood Days, 1890; An Old 
Sweetheart of Mine, 1891; Old Fashioned Roses, 1891; Neighborly Poems 
on Friendship, Grief, and Farm Life, 1891; Flying Islands of the Night, 
1892; Poems Here at Home, 1893; Poems and Yarns [with Edgar Wilson 
Nye], 1893; Green Fields and Running Brooks, 1893; Armazindy, 1894; 
The Child World, 1896; Rttbaiyat of Doc Sifers, 1897; Poems and Prose 
Sketches, Homestead Edition, 10 vols., 1897; Child Rhymes, 1898; Love- 
Lyrics, 1899; Farm Rhymes, 1901; Book of Joyous Children, 1902; A 
Defective Santa Clans, 1904; His Pa's Romance, 1904; Out to Old Aunt 
Mary's, 1904; Songs o' Cheer, 1905; While the Heart Beats Young, 1906; 
Morning, 1907; The Raggedy Man, 1907; The Little Orphant Annie Book, 
1908; The Boys of the Old Glee Club, 1908; Songs of Summer, 1908; Old 
Schoolday Romances, 1909; The Girl I Loved, 1910; Squire Hawkins's 
Story, 1910; When She Was About Sixteen, 1911; The Lockerbie Book, 
1911; Down Round the River and Other Poems, 1911; A Summer's Day 
and Other Poems, 1911; When the Frost la on the Punkin and Other 



THE LATER POETS 353 

Poems, 1911; All the Year Round, 1912; Knee Deep in June and Other 
Poems, 1912; The Prayer Perfect and Other Poems, 1912; Good-bye, Jim, 
1913; A Song of Long Ago, 1913; He and I, 1913; When My Dreams 
Come True, 1913; The Rose, 1913; Her Beautiful Eyes, 1913; Aicay, 1913; 
Do They Miss Me? 1913; The Riley Baby Book, 1913; Biographical Edi- 
tion of the Works of James Whitcomb Riley. Complete Works. 1913. 

Eugene Field. (1850-1896.) Tribune Primer, 1882; Culture's Gar- 
land. Being Memoranda of the Gradual Rise of Literature, Art, Music, and 
Society in Chicago and Other Western Ganglia, 1887 ; A lAttle Book of 
Western Verse, 1889, 1890; A Little Book of Profitable Talcs, 1889, 1890; 
With Trumpet and Drum, 1892; Second Book of Terse, 1893; Echoes from 
the Sabine Farm [with Roswell M. Field], 1893; The Holy Cross and 
Other Tales, 1893; Love Songa of Childhood, 1894; The Love Affairs of 
a Bibliomaniac, The House, Songs and Other Verse, Second Book of Tales, 
published posthumously in the Sabine edition; The Works of Eugene 
Field. Sabine Edition. Ten vols. 1896. The Poems of Eugene Field, 
Complete Editions. One volume. 1910. Eugene Field, A Study in Hered- 
ity and Contradictions. Slason Thompson. Two volumes. 1901. 

Henry Cuyleb Bunner. (1855-1H96.) A Woman of Honor, 1883; 
Airs from Arcady, and Elsewhere, 1884; In Partnership : Studies in Story- 
telling [with James Brander Matthews], 1884; Midge, 1886; Story of a 
New York House, 1887; Short Sixes: Stories to Be Read While the Candle 
Burns, 1890; Zadoc Pine, and Other Stories, 1891; Roircn: Second-Crop 
Songs, 1892; Made in France: French Tales Told with a U. S. Tioist, 
1893; More Short Sixes, 1895; Love in Old Cloathes, and Other Stories, 
1896. 

Emma Lazarus. (1849-1887.) Poems and Translations, 1866; Ad- 
metus, 1871; Alidc: a Romance, 1874; The Spagnoletto: a Play, 1876; 
Heine's Poems and Ballads [a translation], 1881; Songs of a Semite, 
1882; Poems of Emma Lazarus, 1888. 

Celia Thaxter. (1836-1894.) Poems, 1872; Among the Isles of 
Shoals, 1873; Drift-weed: Poems, 1878; Poems for Children, 1S83; The 
Cruise of the Mystery, and Other Poems, 1886; An Island Garden, 1894; 
Poems, Appledoro Edition. Edited by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896; Letters 
of Celia Thaxter, 1895. 

Edith M. Thomas. (1854 .) A New Year's Masque, 1884; The 

Round Year, 1886; Lyrics and Sonnets, 1887; The Inverted Torch, 1890; 
Fair Shadow Land, 1893; In Sunshine Land, 1894; In the Young World, 
1895; Winter Swallow; with Other Verse, 1896; Dancers and Other 
Legends and Lyrics, 1903; Cassia, and Other Verse, 1905; Children of 
Christmas, and Others, 1907; Guest at the Gate, 1909. 

Richard Watson Gilder. (1844-1909.) The \ew Day, 1875; The 
Celestial Passion, 1878; Lyrics, 1878; The Poet and His Master, and 
Other Poems, 1878; Li/rics and Other Poems, 1885; Poems, 1887; Tiro 
Worlds, and Other Poems, 1891; Great Remembrance, and Other Poems, 
1893; Five Books of Song, 1894; For the Country, 1897; In Palestine 
and Other Poems, 1898; Poems and Inscriptions, 1901; .4 Christmas 
Wreath 1903; In the Heights, 1905; Book of Music, 1906; Fire Dunne, 



854 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

1907; Poems, Household Edition, 1908; Lincoln the Leader, 1909; Graver 
Cleveland, 1910. 

Edward Roland Sill. (1841-1887.) The Hermitage and Other Poems, 
1867; Venus of Milo, and Other Poems, 1883; Poems, 1887; The Hermit- 
age, and Later Poems, 1889; Christmas in California: a Poem, 1898; 
Hermione, and Other Poems, 1899; Prose, 1900; Poems, special edition, 
1902; Poems, Household Edition, 1906; The Life of Edward Rowland Sill, 
by W. B. Parker, 1915. 

EoBEKT JjlRns Wilson. (1850-1916.) Life and Love, 1887; Chant of 
a Woodland Spirit, 1894; The Shadows of the Trees, 1898; Until the Day 
Break [a novel], 1900. 

MadIvSon Julius Cawein. (1865-1914.) Blooms of the Berry, 1887; 
The Triumph of Music and Other Lyrics, 1888; Accolon of Gaul and Other 
Poems, 1889; Lyrics and Idyls, 1890; Days and Dreams, 1891; Poems of 
'Nature and Love, 1893; Intuitions of the Beautiful, 1895; White Snake 
and Other Poems, from the German, 1895; Garden of Dreams, 1896; Un- 
dertones, 1896; Shapes and Shadows, 1898; Myth and Romance, a Book 
of Verses, 1899; One Day and Another, 1901; Weeds hy the Wall, 1901; 
A Voice on the Wind and Other Poems, 1902; Vale of Tempe; Poems, 
1905; In Prose and Verse, 1906; Poems, 5 volumes, 1908; Shadow Garden 
[a Phantasy] and Other Plays, 1910; So Many Ways, 1911. 

Richard Hovey. (1864-1900.) The Laurel: an Ode, 1889; Launcelot 
and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas, 1891; Seaward: an Elegy on the 
Death of Thomas William Parsons, 1893; Songs from Vagabondia [with 
Bliss Carman], 1894; More Songs from Vagabondia [with Bliss Carman], 
1896; The Quest of Merlin, 1898; The Marriage of Guenevere, 1898; The 
Birth of Galahad, 1898; Along the Trail: Book of Lyrics, 1898; Last 
Songs from Vagabondia [with Bliss Carman], 1900; Taliesin, 1900; 
Along the Trail, 1907; Launcelot and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas, 5 
vols., 1907; To the End of the Trail, 1908. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 

Voluminous as may seem the poetry of the period when viewed 
by itself, it sinks into insigniticance when viewed against the 
mass of prose that was contemporaneous with it. Overwhelm- 
ingly was it an age of prose fiction. He who explores it emerges 
with the impression that he has been threading a jungle chaotic 
and interminable. To chart it, to find law and tendency in it, 
seems at first impossible. For a generation or more every 
writer seems to have had laid upon him a necessity for narra- 
tion. Never before such widespread eagerness to din tales into 
the ears of a world. 

It was an age of brief fiction — this fact impresses one first of 
all. The jungle growth was short. Not half a dozen writers 
in the whole enormous group confined themselves to novels of 
length; the most distinctive fictional volumes of the period: 
The Luck of Roaring Camp, Old Creole Days, In the Tennessee 
Mountains, Nights with Uncle Remus, In Ole Virginia, A New 
England Nun, Deephaven, Main-Traveled Roads, Flute and Vio- 
lin, and the like, were collections of tales. One may venture to 
call the period the age of the" short story, or more accurately, 
perhaps, the age of short-breathed work. Everywhere literature 
in small parcels. In January, 1872, the North American Re- 
view, guardian of the old traditions, thought the conditions se- 
rious enough to call for earnest protest : 

A new danger has recently shown itself. . . . The great demand on 
all sides is for short books, short articles, short sketches; no elaborate 
essays, no complete monographs, are wanted . . . condensed thought, 
brief expression, the laconian method eveiywhere. . . . The volume 
sinks into an article, the article dwindles to an item to conciliate the 
demands of the public. 

That this shortness of unit was a sign of weakness, we to-day 
by no means concede. It was rather a sign of originality, the 

355 



356 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

symptom of a growing disregard for British methods and British 
opinion. The English genius always has been inclined to pon- 
derousness — to great, slow-moving novels, to elaborate essays 
that get leisurely under way, to romances that in parts are 
treatises and in parts are histories, everywhere to solidity and 
deliberateness of gait. The North American Review protest was 
a British protest ; it was the protest of conservatism against what 
to-day we can see was the new spirit of America. The American 
people from the first had been less phlegmatic, less conservative, 
than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; 
there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for 
short efi'orts. The task of subduing in a single century a raw 
continent produced a people intolerant of the leisurely and the 
long drawn out. Poe perceived the tendency early. In a letter 
to Professor Charles Anthon he wrote: 

Before quitting the Messenger I saw, or fancied I saw, through a 
long and dim vista the brilliant field for ambition which a magazine of 
bold and noble aims presented to him who should successfully estab- 
lish it in America. I perceived that the country, from its very con- 
stitution, could not fail of affording in a few years a larger propor- 
tionate amount of readers than any upon earth. I perceived that the 
whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended wholly to magazine' lit- 
erature — to the curt, the terse, the well timed and the readily diffused, 
in preference to the old forms of verbose and ponderous and inac- 
cessible. 

This far-sightedness made of Poe the father of the American 
type of short story. Irving undoubtedly had sown the earliest 
seeds, but Irving was an essayist and a sketch-writer rather 
than a maker of short stories in the modern sense. It was Poe's 
work to add art to the sketch — plot structure, unity of impres- 
sion, verisimilitude of details, matter-of-factness, finesse — and, 
like Hawthorne, to throw over it the atmosphere of his own pe- 
culiar personality. That he evolved the form deliberately can 
not be doubted. In his oft-quoted review of Hawthorne's tales 
he laid down what may be considered as the first rules for short 
story writing ever formulated. His theories that all art is 
short-breathed, that a long poem is a tour de force against na- 
ture, and that the unit of measure in fiction is the amount that 
may be read with undiminished pleasure at a single sitting, are 
too well known to dwell upon. 



THE TRIUIMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 357 

But the short story of the mid-century, even in its best speei- 
mens, was an imperfect thing. In Hawthorne's tales the quality 
of the sketch or the essay is alwaj^s discernible. All of Poe's 
tales, and Hawthorne's as well, lack vigor of characterization, 
sharpness of outline, swiftness of movement. "The Gold Bug," 
for instance, has its climax in the middle, is faulty in dialect, is 
utterly deficient in local color, and is worked out with char- 
acters as lifeless as mere symbols. 

The vogue of the form was increased enormously by the an- 
nuals which figured so largely in the literary history of the mid- 
century, by the increasing numbers of literary pages in weekly 
newspapers, and by the growing influence of the magazines. 
The first volume of the Atlantic Monthly (1857) had an aver- 
age of three stories in each number. But increase in quantity 
increased but little the quality. The short story of the annual 
was, for the most part, sentimental and over-romantic. Even 
the best work of the magazines is colorless and ineffective when 
judged by modern standards. Undoubtedly the best stories 
after Poe and Hawthorne and before Harte are Fitz-James 
O'Brien's "Diamond Lens," 1858, and "What Was It?" 1859, 
Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country," 1863, 
and "The Brick Moon," 1869, and Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
ginson's "The Haunted Window," 1867. Well wrought they 
are for the most part, unusual in theme, and telling in effect, 
yet are they open nevertheless to the same criticisms which we 
have passed upon Poe. 

The short stoiy in its later form dates from Harte 's ' ' The Luck 
of Roaring Camp." Harte added reality, sharpness of outline, 
vividness of setting, vigor of characterization. The new period 
demanded actuality. The writer must speak with authority ; he 
must have been a part of what he describes; he must have seen 
with his own eyes and he must reproduce with a verisimilitude 
that grips the reader and hastens him on as if he himself were 
a participant in the action. There must be at every point sense 
of actuality, and, moreover, strangeness — new and unheard-of 
types of humanity, uncouth dialects, peculiar environments. It 
was far more concentrated than the mid-century work, but it 
was much more given to general description and background ef- 
fects and impressionistic characterization. 

In the mid-eighties came the perfecting of the form, the mold- 



358 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

ing of the short story into a finished work of art. Now was 
demanded compression, nervous rapidity of movement, sharp- 
ness of characterization, singleness of impression, culmination, 
finesse — a studied artistry that may be compared with even 
the best work of the French school of the same period. Stories 
like those of Aldrieh, Stockton, Bunner, Garland, Allen, Bierce, 
Grace King, Mrs. Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, 
from the standpoint of mere art at least, come near to per- 
fection. 

The decline of the short story, its degeneration into a jour- 
nalistic form, the substitution all too often of smartness, para- 
dox, sensation, for truth — all this is a modern instance outside 
the limits prescribed for our study. 



After Harte and the early local-colorists the next to develop 
the short story was Frank R. Stockton. No writer of the period 
has been more variously estimated and labeled. By some critics 
he has been rated as a mere humorist, by others as a novelist, 
by still others as a writer of whimsicalities in a class by himself. 

It is undoubtedly true that his personality was so interfused 
with his writings that the generation who knew and loved him 
were too kind in their judgments. Behind his every story they 
saw the genial, whimsical creator and they laughed even before 
they began to read. But a new generation has arrived to whom 
Stockton is but a name and a set of books, and it is becoming 
more and more evident now that very much that he wrote was 
ephemeral. To this generation he is known as the author of a 
single short story, or perhaps three or four short stories, of a 
type that has its own peculiar flavor. 

Stockton was born in Philadelphia in 1834, was educated in 
the high school there, and then, at the request of his father, 
learned the trade of wood engraving. But his inclinations were 
literary, and he was soon an editorial worker on his brother's 
newspaper. Later he joined the staff of Hearth and Home in 
New York, then became connected with the new Scrihner's 
Monthly, and finally became assistant editor of St. Nicholas. 

The wide popularity of his stories induced him at length to 
withdraw from editorial work to devote his whole time to his 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 359 

writings. He became exceedingly productive : after his fiftieth 
year he published no fewer than thirty volumes. 

To understand Stockton's contribution to the period one must 
bear in mind that he adopted early the juvenile story as his 
form of expression, and that his first book, Ting-a-ling Stories, 
appeared four years after Alice in Wonderland. When, at the 
age of forty-eight he gained general recognition with his The 
Lady, or the Tiger f he had published nine books, eight of them 
juveniles. The fact is important. He approached literature by 
the Wonderland gate and he never wandered far from that 
magic entrance. After his short stories had made him famous 
he continued to write juveniles, adapting them, however, to his 
new audience of adult readers. He may be summed up as a 
maker of grown-up juveniles, a teller, as it were, of the adven- 
tures of an adult Alice in Wonderland. 

All of his distinctive work was short. Rudder Grange, which 
first made him at all known, was a series of sketches, the hu- 
morous adventures of a newly married couple, the humor con- 
sisting largely of incongruous situations. Even his so-called 
novels, like The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine 
and its sequel The Dusantes, are but a series of episodes joined 
together as loosely as Alice's well-known adventures. Plot there 
is really none. Characterization, however, there is to a degree: 
the two women do carry their provincial Yankee personalities 
and the atmosphere of their little home village into whatever 
amazing environment they may find themselves, but one can 
not say more. 

There seems on the author's part a constant endeavor in all 
of his work to invent incongruous situation and preposterous 
suggestion, and a determination to present this topsy-turvy 
world gravely and seriously as if it were the most commonplace 
thing in the world. He makes it plausible by the Defoe method 
of multiplexing minor details and little realistic touches until 
the reader is thrown completely off his guard. For instance, 
in the novel The Dusantes the coach in which the party is trav- 
eling is overtaken by night in the high mountains and before 
morning is completely buried by a great snow storm. The fol- 
lowing day, after they had hollowed out a room for themselves 
in the snow, this adventure befalls them: 



360 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

I heard a low crunching sound on one side of me, and, turning my 
head, I saw in the wall of my excavation opposite to the stajie coach 
and at a distance of four or five feet from the ground an irregular hole 
in the snow, about a foot in diameter, from which protruded the head 
of a man. This head was wrapped, with the exception of the face, in 
a brown woolen comforter. The features were those of a man of 
about fifty, a little sallow and thin, without beard, whiskers, or mus- 
tache, although the cheeks and chin were darkened with a recent 
growth. 

The astounding apparition of this head projecting itself from the 
snow wall of my cabin utterly paralyzed me, so that I neither moved 
nor spoke, but remained crouching by the fire, my eyes fixed upon the 
head. It smiled a little, and then spoke. 

"Could you lend me a small iron pot?" it said. 

Another coach, it seems, had likewise been snowed under, and 
the chief occupant had tried to tunnel his way out for help, with 
the result as recorded. The passage is typical. It illustrates a 
mannerism that mars all his work. He is not telling a culminat- 
ing story: he is adding incongruity to incongruity for merely 
humorous effect, and after a time the reader tires. It seems 
at length as if he were straining at every point to bring in some- 
thing totally unexpected and preposterous. In short compass 
the device succeeded, but incongruity may not rule longer than 
the moment. 

It is to Stockton's short stories, then, that we are to look for 
his distinctive work. Of one story we need say little. The sen- 
sation it made has few parallels in the history of the period and 
the influence it excited was undoubtedly great. Aldrich sev- 
eral years earlier had told a story which depended for its effect 
upon a startling closing sentence, but Marjorie Daw attracted 
little attention as compared with the tremendous vogue of The 
Lady, or the Tiger? It was a step in the direction of more 
elaborate art. It began to be realized that the short story writer 
had the reader at his mercy. It was recognized that it was a 
part of his art to startle, to perplex, to tantalize, to lead into 
hidden pitfalls, yet always in a way to please and to stimulate. 
From Marjorie Daw and The Lady, or the Tiger? it was but a 
step to the jugglery of 0. Henry. 

None of Stockton's other short stories ever reached the vogue 
of this lucky hit, but many of them surpass it in all the requisites 
of art. "Negative Gravity," "The Transferred Ghost," "The 
Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke," and "The Late Mrs. 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 361 

Null" may be cited as examples. In all of them the art con- 
sists in perfect naturalness, in an exquisite simplicity of style, 
and in topsy-turvyness made within short compass completely 
plausible. We are led into a world of negative gravity where 
everything goes completely by opposites. In "The Transferred 
Ghost" we are gravely assured that Mr. Hinekman, at the point 
of death, has a ghost appointed to haunt his late residence. He 
does not die, however, and as a result the poor ghost is haunted 
by the living Mr. Hinekman until it is nearly frightened out of 
its existence. And so skilful is the author that the story be- 
comes convincing. 

Very much of the success of the work depends upon the ele- 
ment that we call style. Stockton indeed is one of the half 
dozen prose writers of the period to whom may be applied the 
now old-fashioned term stylist. There is grace and character in 
his every sentence, a dignity despite the whimsical content that 
never descends to vulgarity or to what James has termed "news- 
paperese." Always is he clear, always is he simple — his early 
experience with juveniles taught him that — and always is he 
perfectly natural. Moreover, to all this he adds a delightfully 
colloquial attitude toward his reader — a familiar personal tone 
at times that is like nothing so much as Charles Lamb. 

He was an anomaly in the period. In an age of localized 
fiction he produced work as unlocalized as is Carroll's Through 
the Looking Glass; instead of using dialect and curious provincial 
types, he dealt always with refined gentle folk amid surround- 
ings that seem to have little to do with the actual solid earth ; 
in a period that demanded reality and fullness of life he wrote 
little that touches any of the real problems of his time or that has 
in it anything to grip or even to move the reader : even his mur- 
ders are gentle affairs. There are no moments of real emotion : 
all is opera houffe; all is cheery and whimsically conceived. 

That there was knowledge of the human heart behind his 
quaint creations undoubtedly is true. The Lady, or the Tiger f 
is founded on a subtle study of humanity, yet even as one says 
it he is forced to admit that it added little to the real substance 
of the period. He was content to be a mere entertainer, aware 
undoubtedly that the entertainment that delights one generation 
all too often is obsolete in the next. 



362 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 



The appearance of "Monsieur Motte" in the New Princeton 
Review of January, 1886, marks another step in the develop- 
ment of the short story. It was as distinctively French in its 
atmosphere and its art as if it had been a translation from Mau- 
passant, yet it v^ras as originally and peculiarly American as 
even Madame Delphine, which in so many ways it resembles. 
Its English, which is Gallic in idiom and in incisive brevity; 
its atmosphere quivering with passion; its characters whimsical, 
impulsive, exquisite of manners ; its dainty suggestions of fem- 
ininity, as in the case of the little Creole maiden Marie IModeste 
or the stately Madame Lareveillere ; its hints of a rich and tragic 
background, and its startling "Marjorie Daw" culmination — 
there is no Monsieur Motte ; Monsieur Motte is only the pathetic 
negresse Marcelite — all this was French, but the background 
was old Creole New Orleans, and it was drawn by one who pro- 
fessed herself a severe realist, or, to quote her own words, "I 
am not a romanticist, I am a realist a la mode de la Nouvelle- 
Orleans. I have never written a line that w^as not realistic, but 
our life, our circumstances, the heroism of the men and women 
that surrounded my early horizon — all that was romantic. I 
had a mind very sensitive to romantic impressions, but critical as 
to their expression." 

The writer was Grace Elizabeth King, daughter of a prom- 
inent barrister of New Orleans, herself with a strain of Creole 
blood, educated at the fashionable Creole pension of the Mes- 
dames Cenas — the Institute St. Denis of "Monsieur Motte" and 
"Pupasse" — bilingual like all the circle in which she moved, 
and later a resident for some two years in France — no wonder 
that from her stories breathes a Gallic atmosphere such as we 
find in no other work of the period. Three more episodes, each 
a complete short story — "On the Plantation," "The Drama of an 
Evening, ' ' and * ' The Marriage of Marie Modeste ' ' — she added to 
her first story, bits of art that Flaubert would have delighted in, 
and issued them in 1888 under the title Monsieur Moite. She 
followed it with Earthlings, which she has never republished, 
from Lippincott's Magazine, and with other stories and sketches 
contributed to Harper's and the Century that later appeared as 
Tales of a Time and Place and Balcony Stories. 

The impulse to write fiction came to Miss King from a con- 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 363 

viction that Cable had done scant justice to the real Creoles of 
Louisiana. She would depict those exclusive circles of old 
Creole life that she herself had known in her early childhood, 
circles almost exclusively French with just a touch, perhaps, of 
Spanish. She would differ from Cable as Sarah Orne Jewett 
differs from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her pictures of New 
England life. Her sketches, therefore, are more minutely 
drawn, more gentle, more suggestive of the richness and beauty 
of a vanished age that was Parisian and Bourbon in its bril- 
liancy. She excels in her pictures of old Mesdames, relics of 
the old regime, drawn by the lightest of touches and suggestions 
until they are intensely alive, like Bon Maman or like Madame 
Josephine in "A Delicate Affair." A hint or a suggestion is 
made to do the work of a page of analysis. Note a passage 
like this: 

She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always 
won; for she never hesitated to cheat and get out of a tight place, or 
into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and for- 
getting it the moment afterward. 

Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although 
bis dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that 
direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her 
attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders and say, 
"Bah! Lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation. 

All her feminine creations are Gallic, like Marie ]\Iodeste, or, 
better still, the vividly drawn Misette in EartliUngs, volatile, 
lovable — impossible. She is always at her best while depicting 
these whimsical, impracticable, tropic feraininites; she makes 
them not so bewitching as does Cable, but she makes them more 
real and more intensely alive. 

Her earlier stories are the best, judged merely as short stories. 
As she continued her work she discovered more and more the 
wealth of romantic material in the annals of the old city, es- 
pecially in the studies of Charles Gayarre (1805-1895), great- 
est of Southern historians. The influence of his work upon her 
becomes increasingly evident. Her stories grew into sketches. 
Balcony Stories are not so much stories as they are realistic 
sketches of social conditions in New Orleans after the Recon- 
struction. J\Iore and more she wrote studies in Creole atmos- 
pheres, impressions of picturesque places and persons after the 



364 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

manner of Hearn, until at length she abandoned fiction alto- 
gether to devote herself to history. In the period when histori- 
cal fiction for a time ruled everything, she wrote history itself 
in a manner that was as graphic and as picturesque as fiction. 
Perhaps nothing that she has written has in it more of vitality 
than her history of New Orleans and its people. It is possible 
that her final place is to be with the historians rather than with 
the makers of fiction. 

In the technique of the short story she was surpassed by a 
later worker in Louisiana materials, Kate Chopin (1851-1904), 
some of ^whose work is equal to the best that has been produced 
in France or ^ven in America. She wrote but little, two vol- 
umes of stories, notably Bayou Folks, containing all that is now 
accessible of her shorter work. Many of her sketches and stories 
have never been republished from the magazines. 

The strength of Mrs. Chopin's work came partly from the 
strangeness of her material — she told of the Grand Pre Acadians 
in the canebrakes of central Louisiana — and from her intimate 
knowledge of her field, but it came more from what may be 
described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to 
genius. She was of Celtic temperament — her father was a Gal- 
way County Irishman and her mother was of mingled French 
and old Virginian stock. Educated in the Convent of the Sa- 
cred Heart at St. Louis, married at nineteen to a New Orleans 
cotton factor, spending fourteen years in Louisiana, the last four 
of them in the remote hamlet of Cloutiersville in Natchitoches 
Parish, "a rambling little French village of one street, with the 
Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and 
the Red River flowing through everybody's backyard," left a 
widow at thirty-five with six children — all this had little to do 
with the making of literature. Indeed, until her return to St. 
Louis a year after her bereavement, she had never even thought 
of writing. She began almost by chance, and, succeeding from 
the first, she wrote story after story almost without effort and 
wholly without study of narrative art. For a decade her work 
was in all of the Northern magazines, then five years before her 
death, discouraged by the reception of her novel The Awakening, 
she became silent. 

No writer of the period was more spontaneously and inevit- 
ably a story teller. There is an ease and a naturalness about 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 365 

her work that comes from more than mere art. She seldom 
gave to a story more than a single sitting, and she rarely revised 
her work, yet in compression of style, in forbearance, in the 
massing of materials, and in artistry she ranks with even the 
masters of the period. A story like "Desiree's Baby," with its 
inevitableness and its culminating sentence that stops for an 
instant the reader's heart, is well-nigh perfect. She was emo- 
tional, she was minutely realistic, and, unlike Grace King, used 
dialect sometimes in profusion; she was dramatic and even at 
times melodramatic, yet never was she commonplace or ineffec- 
tive. She hacl command at times of a pervasive humor and a 
pathos that gripped the reader before he was aware, for behind 
all was the woman herself. She wrote as Dickens wrote, with 
abandonment, with her whole self. There is art in her work, 
but there is more than art. One may read again and again such 
bits of human life as "Madame Celestin's Divorce": it is the art 
that is independent of time and place, the art indeed that is uni- 
versal. 

Ill 

Of a type the direct opposite was James Lane Allen, who was 
not inspired and who was not an improvisatore. To Allen fic- 
tion was an art learned with infinite patience. He was years 
in the mastering of it, years in which he studied literature with 
the abandonment of a Maupassant. He approached it deliber- 
ately ; he made himself the most scholarly of the novelists of the 
period — graduate and graduate student of Transylvania Uni- 
versity, first applicant for the degree of doctor of philosophy at 
Johns Hopkins, though he never found opportunity for resi- 
dence, teacher for years of languages, and then professor of 
Latin and higher English at Bethany College, West Virginia. 

The circumstances of his early life made a literary career 
difficult. He had been born on a small Kentucky plantation 
a few miles out of Lexington, miles that he walked daily while 
gaining his education. A college course for him meant toil and 
sacrifice. The war had brought poverty, and the death of the 
father imposed new burdens. Like Lanier, he was forced to 
teach schools when he would have studied at German universi- 
ties, but, like Lanier, he somehow had caught a vision of litera- 
ture that dominated him even through decades of seeming hope- 
lessness. Few have had to fight longer for recognition and few 



366 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

have ever worked harder to master the art with which they were 
to make their appeal. Like Howells, he studied masters and 
read interminably, pursuing his work into the German and the 
French, writing constantly and rewriting and destroying. And 
the result, as with Howells, was no immaturities. His first book, 
Flute and Violin, published when he was forty-two, is by many 
regarded as his best work. To his earliest readers it seemed as 
if a new young writer had arrived to whom art was a spon- 
taneous thing mastered without effort. 

A study of the available fragments of Allen's work written 
earlier than the stories in this first volume reveals much. He 
began as a critic. In Northern journals after 1883 one may find 
many articles signed with his name : sharp criticisms of Henry 
James, appreciations of Heine and Keats, studies of the art of 
Balzac and his circle, letters on timely subjects which show the 
wideness of his reading and the gradual shaping of his art. He 
evolved his method deliberately after consideration of all that 
had been done in England and America and France. By no 
other writer of the period was the short story worked out with 
more care or with more knowledge of requirements. 

Especially significant is an article entitled "Local Color" in 
the Critic of 1886. The time has come, he contended, when the 
writer of fiction must broaden the old conceptions of art. Now 
the novelist must be "in some measure a scientist; he must com- 
prehend the natural pictorial environment of humanity in its 
manifold effects upon humanity, and he must make this knowl- 
edge available for literary presentation." Other requirements 
had become imperative : 

From an artistic point of view, the aim of local color should be 
to make the picture of human life natural and beautiful, or dreary, or 
somber, or terrific, as the special character of the theme may demand; 
from a scientific point of view, the aim of local color is to make the 
picture of human life natural and — intelligible, by portraying those 
pieturable potencies in nature that made it what it was and must go 
along with it to explain what it is. The novelist must encompass both 
aims. 

He must also be a stylist. "The happiest use of local color," 
he declares, "will test to the uttermost one's taste and attain- 
ments as a language colorist." And again, "The utmost in the 
use of local color should result, when the writer chooses the 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 367 

most suitable of all colors that are characteristic ; when he makes 
these available in the highest degree for artistic presentation; 
and when he attains and uses the perfection of coloring in 
style. ' ' 

One makes another discovery as one works among these earlier 
fragments : Allen, like Howells, was a poet. His first contribu- 
tions to the larger magazines — Harper's and the Atlantic — were 
poems, beautiful, serious, colorful. 

After these preliminaries one is prepared to find work done 
with excess of care, with precision and balance, and, moreover, 
to find color in its literal sense, poetic atmosphere and poetic 
phrasing, scientific truth too, nature studied as Thoreau studied 
it, and Burroughs. The six stories in Flute and Violin stand by 
themselves in American literature. They are not perfect exam- 
ples of the short story judged by the latest canons. They make 
often too much of the natural background, they lack in swift- 
ness, and they do not culminate with dramatic force. They are 
poetic, at times almost lyrical. Open, for instance, A Kentucky 
Cardinal: 

March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with 
that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper air 
the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his Avay onward by faith, 
not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing open 
the shutters, strained eyes toward the unseen and unseeing explorer, 
startled, as a half-asleep soldier might be startled by the faint bugle- 
call of his commander, blown to him from the clouds. What far-off 
lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In what soft 
sylvan watere will he bury his tired breast? Always when I hear his 
voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone out of these 
earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler — gone to some vast, 
pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I 
love and those who love me, will aiTive in safety, there to be together. 

One thinks of Thoreau — one thinks of him often as one reads 
Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical 
light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy 
of human life — beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty 
of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and 
pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expres- 
sion, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such 
deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White 
Cowl" which appeared in the Century of 1888 and later "Sister 



368 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later 
than "Ethan Brand." 

In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short 
stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single 
and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding 
the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. 
His art began with landscape — his second book, much of the 
matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was 
wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then 
came John Gray, a preliminary sketch, and A Kentucky Car- 
dinal and its sequel Aftermath, long and short stories, parables, 
humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spec- 
tacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it 
all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy 
too soon. 

The second period began in 1896 with the publication of Sum- 
mer in Arcady. The novelist had moved permanently to New 
York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the 
new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French 
novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, 
mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the 
novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with 
broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that compli- 
cate human life. His essay in the Atlantic of October, 1897, 
explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the 
mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he 
averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at re- 
finement. 

They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate elements of 
our national life escaped the lidless eye of publicity, and paid their 
delicate tributes to these; on the clumsy canvases of our tumultuous 
democracy they watched to see where some solitary being or group of 
beings described lines of living grace, and with grace they detached 
these and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters; they 
found themselves impelled to look for the minute things of our human- 
ity, and having gathered these, to polish them, carve them, compose 
them into minute structures with minutest elaboration . . . polishing 
and adornment of the little things of life — little ideas, little emotions, 
little states of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and denouements, 
little comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played 
through by little men and women on the little stage of little play- 
houses. 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 369 

So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own 
earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine 
age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a 
strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and 
squeamish. 

It is striking out boldly for larger things — larger areas of adven- 
ture, larger spaces of history, with freer movements through both : it 
would have the wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of a bird 
on a woman's hat. It reveals a disposition to place its scenery, its 
companies of players, and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, 
half-lighted, dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of 
the obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more dis- 
cernible than another, it is the movement away from the summits of 
life downward towards the bases of life; from the heights of civiliza- 
tion to the primitive springs of action; from the thin-aired regions of 
consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of 
consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils 
on forever the cyclopean youth. Instinct. 

It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was 
the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and 
narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main cur- 
rents of the age. 

Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the literary materials 
of less self-consciousness, of larger self-abandonment, and thus impart 
to our fiction the free, the uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing 
that are the very genius of our time and spirit. 

Following this declaration came the three major novels. The 
Choir Invisible, which was his old short story John Gray en- 
larged and given "fling and swing," The Reign of Law, and 
The Mettle of the Pasture, novels of the type which he had de- 
nominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with noth- 
ing else in American literature, their only analogues being found 
in England or France. 

In all his work he had been, as he had promised in his essay 
on "Local Color," essentially scientific in spirit, but now he be- 
came direct, fearless, fundamental. Nature he made central 
now. The older art had made of it a background, a thing apart 
from humanity, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes indifferent, 
but Allen, like Hardy and his school, made of it now a ruling 
force, a dominating personality in the tragedy. The first title 



370 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

of Summer in Arcady as it ran serially in the Cosmopolitan was 
Butterflies: a Tale of Nature. Its theme was the compelling 
laws within human life: instincts, inheritances, physical forces 
that bind beyond power to escape. Man is not to be treated as 
apart from Nature but as inseparably a part of Nature, hurled 
on by forces that he does not understand, ruled all unknowingly 
by heredity, fighting senseless battles that, could he but know 
all, would reduce life to a succession of ironies: "If Daphne 
had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [on 
which her own runaway marriage had just been recorded, the 
last of a long series of such marriages] were the names of her 
own father and mother." 

In these later novels one finds now fully developed an element 
that had been latent in all of his early work — a mystic symbolism 
that in many ways is peculiar to Allen. Summer in Arcady is 
built up around a parallelism that extends into every part of 
the story: 

Can you consider a field of butterflies and not think of the blindly 
wandering, blindly loving, quickly passing human race"? Can you 
observe two young people at play on the meadows of Life and Love 
without seeing in them a pair of these brief moths of the sun? 

And The Reign of Law is a parable from beginning to end, 
a linking of man to Nature, a parallelism between human life 
and the life of the hemp of the Kentucky fields: 

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted; 
which must struggle upward, be cut down, rooted and broken, ere the 
separation take place between our dross and our worth — poor perish- 
able shard and immortal iiber. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that 
growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, 
until the time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of 
weakness, it is borne from the field of its nativity for the long service. 

All of his work is essentially timeless and placeless. He 
had had from the first little in common with the other short 
story writers of locality. Of dialect he has almost none; of 
the negro who so dominates Southern literature he shows only 
a glimpse in one or two of his earlier sketches. His background, 
to be sure, is always Kentucky and this background he describes 
with minuteness, but there is no attempt to portray personali- 
ties or types peculiar to the State. He is working rather in the 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 371 

realm of human life. Always is he tremendously serious. A 
lambent humor may play here and there over the tales, but 
everywhere is there the feeling of coming tragedy. Too much 
concerned he is, perhaps, with the conception of sex as the cen- 
tral problem of life — Summer in Arcady and The Mettle of the 
Pasture were greeted with storms of disapproval — but one feels 
that he is sincere, that he stands always on scientific grounds, 
and that he is telling what he conceives to be the undiminished 
truth about modern life. 

And his solution, so far as he offers a solution, is free from 
bitterness or pessimism. He is superior to Hardy inasmuch as 
he is able to rise above the pagan standpoint and see the end 
of the suffering and the ironj^ crowned with ultimate good. 
John Gray in The Choir Invisible summed up the philosophy 
of the author in sentences like these: "To lose faith in men, 
not in humanity; to see justice go down and not to believe in 
the triumph of injustice ; for every wrong that you weakly deal 
another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness 
and beauty of what is right, and so to turn the ever-increasing 
love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that 
is above us all — the perfection that is God: this is one of the 
ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles 
in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out ; but as 
quickly as I could snatch any torch — with your sacred name on 
my lips — it has been relighted." 

The volume of his writings is small. He has worked always 
slowly, revising, rewriting, never satisfied. His earlier short 
stories are perhaps his most perfect work; his longer short 
stories, like A Kentucky Cardinal, his most charming; and his 
later novels like The Mettle of the Pasture, his most enduring, 
inasmuch as they contain the chief substance of what he had to 
say to his generation. His weakness has been a fondness for 
elaboration: in The Reign of Law a chapter is given to the life 
history of the hemp plant and to a parallelism between it and 
human life. The movement of his stories is constantly impeded 
by what is really extraneous material, endless descriptions of 
landscape, beautiful in itself but needless, and unnecessary 
episodes: a cougar "gaunt with famine and come for its kill" 
is creeping up to John Gray, who is weaponless, but before the 
final spring four pages about the habits of the animal — a chap- 



372 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

ter altogether for the adventure, and after it is all told it is 
"lumber" so far as the needs of the novel are concerned. 

But there is a more fundamental weakness : his work on the 
whole is the product of a follower rather than a leader. He 
learned his art deliberately impelled not by a voice within which 
demanded expression but by a love for beautiful things and a 
dogged determination to win in the field that he had chosen for 
his life work. By interminable toil and patience, and by alert- 
ness to seize upon everj'^ new development in his art, he made 
himself at last a craftsman of marvelous skill, even of brilliancy. 
He was not a voice in the period ; rather was he an artisan with 
a sure hand, a craftsman with exquisite skill. 

IV 

The triumph of the short story came in the early nineties. 
In the September, 1891, issue of Harper's Monthly Mr. Howells, 
reviewing Garland's Main-Traveled Roads, commented on the 
fact that collections of stories from the magazines were com- 
peting on even terms with the novels : 

We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all under- 
take to say; but it is probably attributable to a number of causes. It 
may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling which has broken 
down all prejudices against the form of his success. The vogue that 
Maupassant's tales in the original or in versions have enjoyed may 
have had something to do with it. Possibly the critical recognition of 
the American supremacy in this sort has helped. But however it has 
come about, it is certain that the result has come, and the publishers 
are fearlessly venturing volumes of short stories on eveiy hand; and 
not only short stories by authors of established repute, but by new 
writers who would certainly not have found this way to the public 
some time ago. 

During this decade the short story reached its highest level. 
In February, 1892, the Atlantic Monthly in a review of current 
collections of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chand- 
ler Harris, James Lane Allen, Octave Thanet, Hamlin Garland, 
Richard Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry 
Cooke, George A. Hibbard, William Douglas O'Connor, Clinton 
Ross, Thomas A. Janvier, H. C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, and 
Frank R. Stockton, remarked of the form that "in America it 
is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of litera- 
ture. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 373 

nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel." But 
even within the limits of the decade of its fullest success came 
the decline. The enormous vogue of the form resulted in the 
journalization of it. 0. Henry with his methods helped greatly 
to devitalize and cheapen it. With him the short story became 
fictional vaudeville. Everywhere a straining for effect, a 
search for the piquant and the startling. He is theatric, stagy, 
smart, ultra modern. Instead of attempts at truth a succession 
of smart hits: ''The wind out of the mountains was singing 
like a jew's-harp in a pile of old tomato-cans by the railroad 
track"; "A bullet-headed man Smith was, with an oblique, dead 
eye and the mustache of a cocktail mixer," etc. He is flippant, 
insincere, with an eye to the last sentence which must startle 
the reader until he gasps. After 0. Henry the swift decline of 
the short story, the inclusion of it in correspondence courses, and 
the reign of machine-made art. 



But during the decade of the high tide came some of the 
strongest work in American literature. It was the period of the 
earlier and better work of Hamlin Garland and Alice French, of 
Richard Harding Davis and Ambrose Bierce, of Mrs, Deland and 
F, H. Smith, with Garland, perhaps, the most distinctive worker. 
Garland began as an iconoclast, a leader of the later phase of 
realism — depressed realism after the Russian and the French 
types. His little book of essays. Crumbling Idols, breezy and 
irreverent, with its cry for a new Americanism in our literature, 
new truth, new realism, was the voice of the new generation 
after Harte and Howells, the school inspired by Ibsen, Hardy, 
Tolstoy, Maupassant. The INIiddle West was his background and 
he knew it with completeness. He had been born in a Wiscon- 
sin ''coule" on a ragged, half-broken farm, and before he 
was eleven he had migrated with his parents westward, three 
different times. His boyhood had followed the middle western 
border. The father was of ]\Iaine Yankee stock, full of the rest- 
lessness and eagerness of his generation. In his son's record he 
stands out in almost epic proportions. 

Hour after hour we pushed westward, the heads of our tired horses 
hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but 



374 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

my father's voice calling to his team lost nothing of its edge. He was 
in his element. He loved this shelterless SAveep of sod. This west- 
ward march delighted him. I think he would have gladly kept on until 
he reached the Rocky Mountains.^ 

He had stopped this time in Iowa and had begun once again 
the tremendous task of making a farm out of the virgin prairie. 
The boy took his full share of work. Speaking of himself in the 
third person, he says: "In the autumn that followed his elev- 
enth birthday he plowed for seventy days, overturning nearly 
one hundred and fifty acres of stubble." At fifteen he was 
head farmer and took a man's place on the reaper, at the thresh- 
ing, and in all of the farm work. Education came to him as he 
could get it. He attended the winter sessions of the district 
school and he read all the books that the neighborhood afforded. 
By rarest good fortune his father subscribed for the new Hearth 
and Home in which the serial The Hoosier Schoolmaster was 
running, and in the boy's own words in later years the story 
was a ' ' milestone in his literary progress as it was in the develop- 
ment of distinctive Western fiction." 

His later struggles toward culture, his graduation in 1881 
from Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, his school teaching 
in Illinois and Dakota,, his experience as a settler during the 
Dakota land "boom" of 1883, his Howells-like journey to Bos- 
ton the following year, and his years of life there as teacher and 
eager student, must be passed over swiftly. He haunted the 
Boston public library and read enormously, he became impressed 
with the theories of the new French school of "Veritists," and 
he soon began to write, first photographic sketches of Middle- 
Western life — corn and wheat raising, rural customs, and the 
like — then after a long period he returned West for his first va- 
cation. At Chicago he visited Joseph Kirkland (1830-1894), 
author of Zury: the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887), 
a book of crude yet strong pictures of Western life, and the call 
was another milestone in his literary life. 

The result of that vacation was three books of short stories, 
their author's most distinctive work, Main-Traveled Roads, 
Prairie Folks, and Other Main-Traveled Roads. His own ac- 
count of the matter is worthy of quotation: 

1 Collier's, May 9, 1914. 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 375 

The entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my 
old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to 
my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living 
at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, 
and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series 
of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had 
lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in 
this re^dsed definitive edition of Main-Traveled Roads and its com- 
panion volume. Other Main-Traveled Roads (compiled from other vol- 
umes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short 
stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889. 

It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat 
since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life m the 
West is still a stem round of drudgery. My pages present it — not as 
the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it — but as the 
working fanner endures it. 

After the years at Boston the life of his native region had 
taken on for him a totally nev^r aspect. He saw it now as How- 
ard saw it in "Up the Coule," the grinding toil of it, the brutal- 
ity and hopelessness and horror of it, and it filled him with fierce 
anger. He wrote with full heart and with an earnestness that 
was terrible, and he had the courage of his convictions. Will 
Hannan takes Agnes from the hell into which she has married 
and bears her into his own new home of love and helpfulness and 
there is no apology, and again the same theme in later tales. 
There is the grimness and harshness and unsparing fidelity to 
fact, however unpleasant, that one finds in the Russian realists, 
but there is another element added to it: the fervor and faith 
of the reformer. Such a story as ''Under the Lion's Paw," for 
instance, does not leave one, like Ibsen and Hardy, in despair 
and darkness; it arouses rather to anger and the desire to take 
action harsh and immediate. There is no dodging of facts. All 
the dirt and coarseness of farm life come into the picture and 
often dominate it. The author is not writing poetry ; despite his 
Prairie Songs he is no poet. Howard is visiting home after a 
long absence: 

It was humble enough — a small white story-and-a-half stracture, 
with a wing set in the midst of a few locust trees; a small drab-colored 
bam with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a 
few cows were standing, fighting the (lies and waiting to be milked. 
An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing 
from a pen near by; a child was crying. ... 

As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impa- 



376 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

tient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. 
The longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness, 
dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. 
All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from 
the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on 
the platform by the pump. 

"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk. 

Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening." 

Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more 
sullen. "Don't you know me. Grant *? I am Howard." 

The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are*?" 
after a pause. "Well, I 'm glad to see you, but I can't shake hands. 
That damned cow has laid down in the mud." 

But the most pitiful pictures are those of the women. Lucretia 
Burns is a type: 

She had no shawl or hat and no shoes, for it was still muddy in the 
little yard, where the cattle stood patiently fightmg the flies and mosqui- 
toes swarming into their skins, already wet with blood. The evenmg 
was oppressive with its heat, and a ring of just-seen thunder-heads 
gave premonitions of an approaching storm. 

She arose from the cow's side at last, and, taking her pails of foam- 
ing milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her 
lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and 
faded calico dress showed her tired and swollen ankles, and the mosqui- 
toes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her 
colorless hair. 

The children were quarreling at the well, and the sound of blows 
could be heard. Calves were querulously calling for their milk, and 
little turkeys, lost in a tangle of grass, were piping plaintively. 

It was a pitifully worn, almost tragic face — long, thin, sallow, hol- 
low-eyed. The mouth had long since lost the power to shape itself 
into a kiss, and had a droop at the corners which seemed to announce 
a breaking-down at any moment into a despairing wail. The collarless 
neck and sharp shoulders showed painfully. 

It is the tragic world of Mary E. Wilkins — her obstinate, ele- 
mental, undemonstrative rustics moved into a new setting. As 
in her work, simplicity, crude force, the power of one who for 
a moment has forgotten art and gives the feeling of actual life, 
verisimilitude that convinces and compels. The little group of 
stories is work sent hot from a man's heart, and they are alive 
as are few other stories of the period, and they will live. They 
are part of the deeper history of a section and an era. 

This element of purpose is found in all of Garland's work. 
Nowhere is he a mere teller of tales. The Scotch and Yankep 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 377 

elements within him made of him a preacher, a man with a 
message. The narrow field of his first success could not long 
be worked, and, like the true son of a pioneer, he began to follow 
his old neighbors in their further migrations westward. His 
later work took the form of novels, many of them dealing with 
the extreme West and all of them saturated with purpose. His 
Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, for instance, attempted for 
the Indian what Ramona tried to do. It is a powerful study 
of the wrongs done a race, and, moreover, it is a novel. Still 
later the native mysticism of his race showed itself in such nov- 
els as The Tyranny of the Dark, The Sliadow World, Victor 
Ollnee's Discipline — spiritualistic propaganda. 

With the novel he has not fully succeeded. He lacks power 
of construction and ability for extended effort. The short story 
"A Branch Road" in Main-Traveled Roads has a gripping power, 
but the same theme treated at novel length in Moccasin Ranch 
becomes too much an exploiting of background. There is a sense 
of dilution, a loss of effect. The author 's first fine edge of anger, 
of conviction, of complete possession by his material, is gone, and 
we have the feeling that he has become a professional man of 
letters, an exploiter of what he considers to be salable material. 
His best long novel is Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Money Magic 
has a certain sense of power connected with it, but it lacks the 
final touch of actual life. Unlike The Rise of Silas Lapham, 
with which it may be compared, it leaves us unsatisfied. The 
quivering sense of reality that one finds in Main-Traveled Roads 
is not there. It is a performance, a brilliant picture made de- 
liberately and coldly by a man in his study, whereas a story 
like "Among the Corn Rows" reads as if it had taken possession 
of its author, and had been written with a burst of creative 
enthusiasm. One late fragment of Garland's must not be over- 
looked, his A Son of the Middle Border, a part of which has 
appeared in serial form. It is an autobiography, and it is more : 
it is a document in the history of the Middle West. It has a 
value above all his novels, above all else that he has written, 
saving always those tense short stories of his first inspiration. 

VI 

The Western stories of Alice French antedated by several years 
Garland's first work and perhaps had an influence upon it. Her 



378 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

strong story "The Bishop's Vagabond" appeared in the Atlantic 
as early as 1884 and her collection Knitters in the Sun by Octave 
Thanet came out in 1887. Her work, however, has not the orig- 
inality and the sharpness of outline of Garland's and it has 
failed to hold the high place that was at first assigned to it. 
She is to be classed with Miss Woolson rather than with Mrs. 
Wilkins Freeman, with Miss Murfree rather than with Harris. 
She was not a native of the regions she chose as her literary field, 
but she entered them with curiosity and studied their peculiari- 
ties carefully with open note-book for Northern readers. 

Her father and her brothers were extensive manufacturers, 
and contact with their work gave her a knowledge of labor con- 
ditions and of economic problems that enabled her in the early 
eighties to contribute to the Atlantic and other magazines able 
papers, such as "The Indoor Pauper" and "Contented Masses," 
papers widely commented upon for their brilliancy and breadth 
of view. But the success won everywhere by the feminine short 
story writers tempted her from these economic studies, and for 
a tim^ she wrote local color tales with variety of background — 
Canada, Florida, Iowa. Then, with ample means at her disposal, 
she built at Clover B^d, Arkansas, a summer home on the banks 
of the Black River, and, like Miss Murfree, became interested in 
the crude social conditions about her, so different from those of 
her native New England or her adopted Iowa city of Daven- 
port. Stories like "Whitsun Harp, Regulator" and "Ma' 
Bowlin' " followed, then the fine studies entitled "Plantation 
Life in Arkansas" and "Town Life in Arkansas." 

These earlier stories are often dramatic, even melodramatic, 
and they abound in sentiment. Sometimes a character stands 
out with sharpness, but more often the tale impresses one as a 
performance rather than a bit of actual life. The intense feel- 
ing that Garland, who wrote as if his material came from out 
his own bitter heart, throws into his stories she does not have. 
She stands as an outsider and looks on with interest and takes 
notes, often graphic notes, then displays her material as an ex- 
hibitor sets forth his curious collection. 

More and more the sociological specialist and the reformer 
took control of her pen. Even her short stories are not free 
from special pleading: "Convict Number 49," for instance, is 
not so much a story as a tract for the times. In her novels the 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 379 

problem dominates. The Man of the Hour and The Lion's 
Share treat phases of the labor problem, and By Inheritance is 
a study of the negro question with an attempted solution. The 
story, despite dramatic intensity at times and lavish sentiment, 
fails often to interest the reader unless he be a sociologist or 
a reformer. Already she holds her place by reason of a few 
of her earlier short stories, and it would seem that even these 
are now losing the place that once undoubtedly was theirs. 

More convincing, though perhaps they have had smaller in- 
fluence upon their time, have been the Vermont stories of Row- 
land E. Robinson, which are genuine at every point and full of 
subtle humor, and the Adirondack stories of Philander Deming, 
which began to appear in the Atlantic in the mid-seventies. 
Both men have written out of their own lives with full hearts, 
and both have added to their material a touch of originality 
that has made it distinctive. 

VII 

In tracing the development of the short story to the end of 
the century one must pause at the exquisite work of H. C. Bun- 
ner, who undoubtedly did much toward Jaringing the form to 
mechanical perfection. His volume entitled Made in France: 
French Tales ivith a TJ. 8. Twist, suggests, one secret of his art. 
He had a conciseness, a brilliancy of effect, an epigrammatic 
touch, that suggest the best qualities of French style. In his 
volumes Short Sixes and 3Iore Short Sixes he is at his best — 
humorous, artistic, effective, and in addition he touches at times 
the deeper strata of human life and becomes an interpreter and 
a leader. 

French in effect also is Ambrose Bierce, who in his earlier 
work displayed a power to move his readers that is little found 
outside of Poe. Reserve he has, a directness that at times is 
disconcerting, originality of a peculiar type, and a command 
of many of the subtlest elements of the story-telling art, but 
lacking sincerity, he fails of permanent appeal. He writes for 
effect, for startling climax, for an insidious attack upon his 
reader's nerves, and often, as in his collection entitled In the 
Midst of Life, he works his will. But he is not true, he works 
not in human life as it is actually lived, but in a Poe-like life that 
exists only in his own imaginings. In his later years journal- 



380 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

ism took the fine edge from his art and adverse criticism of his 
work turned him into something like a literary anarchist who 
criticized with bitterness all things established. A few of his 
novels may be studied with profit as models of their kind, but 
the greater part of his writings despite their brilliancy can not 
hope for permanence. 

One may close the survey with Richard Harding Davis, who 
may be taken as the typical figure of the last years of the cen- 
tury. Davis was a journalist, peculiarly and essentially a jour- 
nalist. He began his career in a newspaper office and all that 
he did was colored by the newspaper atmosphere. Literature 
to him was a thing to be dashed off with facility, to be read with 
excitement, and to be thrown aside. The art of making it he 
learned as one learns any other profession, by careful study and 
painstaking thoroughness, and having mastered it he became a 
literary practitioner, expert in all branches. 

''Gallagher" was his first story, and it was a brilliant pro- 
duction, undoubtedly his best. Then followed the Van Bibber 
stories, facile studies of the idle rich area of New York life of 
which the author was a mere spectator, remarkable only for the 
influence they exerted on younger writers. Of the rest of his 
voluminous output little need be said. It is ephemeral, it was 
made to supply the demand of the time for amusement. With 
0. Henry, Edward W. Townsend of the "Chimmie Fadden" 
stories, and others, its author debauched the short story and 
made it the mere thing of a day, a bit of journalism to be 
thrown aside with the paper that contained it. On the mechani- 
cal side one may find but little fault. As a performance it is 
often brilliant, full of dash and spirit and excessive modernness, 
but it lacks all the elements that make for permanence — ^beauty 
of style, distinction of phrase, and, most of all, fidelity to the 
deeper truths of life. It imparts to its reader little save a mo- 
mentary titillation and the demand for more. It deals only 
with the superficial and the coarsely attractive, and we feel it 
is so because of its author's limitations, because he knows little 
of the deeps of character, of sacrifice, of love in the genuine 
sense, of the fundamental stuff of which all great literature has 
been woven. He is the maker of extravaganzas, of Zenda ro- 
mances, of preposterous combinations like A Soldier of Fortune, 
which is true neither to human nature nor to any possibility of 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 381 

terrestrial geography; he is a special correspondent with facile 
pen who tells nothing new and nothing authoritative — a man 
of the mere to-day, and with the mere to-day he will be for- 
gotten. Were he but an isolated case such criticism were un- 
necessary; he might be omitted from our study; but he is the 
type of a whole school, a school indeed that bids fair to exert 
enormous influence upon the literature, especially upon the fic- 
tion, of the period that is to come. 

VIII 

Thus the fiction of the period has expressed itself prevailingly' 
in short-breathed work. Compared with the fiction of France 
or England or Russia, with the major work of Balzac or Thack- 
eray or Tolstoy, it has been a thing of seeming fragments. In- 
stead of writing "the great American novel," which was so 
eagerly looked for during all the period, its novelists have pre- 
ferred to cultivate small social areas and to treat even these by 
means of brief sketches. 

The reasons are obvious. American life during the period 
was so heterogeneous, so scattered, that it has been impossible 
to comprehend any large part of it in a single study. The novel- 
ist who would express himself prevailingly in the larger units 
of fiction, like Henry James, for instance, or F. Marion Craw- 
ford, has been forced to take his topics from European life. The 
result has been narrowness, cameos instead of canvases, short 
stories rather than novels. In a period that over enormous 
areas was transforming thousands of discordant elements into 
what was ultimately to be a unity, nothing else was possible. 
Short stories were almost imperative. He who would deal with 
crude characters in a bare environment can not prolong his story 
without danger of attenuation. The failure of ]\Iiss Murfree, 
and indeed of nearly all of the short story writers when they 
attempted to expand their compressed and carefully wrought 
tales into novels, has already been dwelt upon. 

But shortness of unit is not a fault. The brevity of the form, 
revealing as it does with painful conspicuousness all inferior 
elements, has resulted in an excellence of workmanship that has 
made the American short story the best art form of its kind to 
be found in any literature. The richness of the materials used 
has also raised the quality of the output. The picturesqueness 



382 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

of American life during the period has made possible themes 
of absorbing interest and unusual vividness of picturing, and 
the elemental men and passions found in new and isolated areas 
have furnished abundance of material for characterization. 
Until the vast field of American life becomes more unified and 
American society becomes less a matter of provincial varieties, 
the short story will continue to be the unit of American fiction. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Frank Richakd Stockton. (1834-1902.) Ting-a-ling Stories, 1869; 
Roundabout Papers, 1872; The Home, 1872; What Might Have Been Ex- 
pected, 1874; Tales Out of School, 1875; Rudder Grange, 1879; A Jolly 
Fellowship, 1880; The Floating Prince, 1881; The Story of Viteau, 1884; 
The Lady, or the Tiger? and Other Stories, 1884; The Casting Away of 
Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine, 1886; A Christmas Wreck and Other 
Stories, 1886; The Late Mrs. Null, 1886; The Hundredth Man, 1887; The 
Bee Man of Orne, 1887; The Dusantes, 1888; Amos Kilbright, 1888; 
Personally Conducted, 1889; The Great War Syndicate, 1889; Ardis 
Claverden, 1890; Stories of Three Burglars, 1890; The Merry Chanter, 
1890; The Squirrel Inn, 1891; The House of Martha, 1891; Rudder 
Grangers Abroad, 1891; The Clocks of Rondaine, 1892; The Watch-Mak- 
er's Wife, 1893; Pomona's Travels, 1894; The Adventures of Captain Horn, 
1895; Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, 1896; Stories of New Jersey, 1896; A Story-Tell- 
er's Pack, 1897; The Great Stone of Sardis, 1898; The Girl at Cobhurst, 
1898; Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast, 1898; The Vizier of the Two- 
Horned Alexander, 1899; The Associate Hermits, 1899; A Bicycle of 
Cathay, 1900; Afield and Afloat, 1900; The Novels and Stories of Frank 
R. Stockton, Shenandoah Edition, 18 vols., 1900; Kate Bonnet, 1902. 

Grace King. (1852 .) Monsieur Motte, 1888; Earthlings [in 

Lippincott's Magazine^; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Jean Baptists 
Le Moyne, 'Sieur de Bienville [Makers of American Series], 1892; Balcony 
Stories, 1893; History of Louisiana [with J. R. Ficklen], 1894; New Or- 
leans, the Place and the People, 1895; De Soto and His Men in the Land 
of Florida, 1898; Stories from Louisiana History [with J. R. Ficklen J, 
1905 . 

Kate Chopin. (1851-1904.) At Fault, a Novel, 1890; Bayou Folk, 
1894; A Night in Acadie and Other Stories, 1897; The Awakening, a 
Novel, 1899. 

James Lane Allen. (1849 .) Flute and Violin, and Other 

Kentucky Tales and Romances, 1891; The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, 
1892; John Gray: a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time, 1893; A Kentucky 
Cardinal: a Story, 1894; Aftermath: Part Two of a Kentucky Cardinal, 
1895; Summer in Arcady : a Tale of Nature, 1896; The Choir Invisible, 
1897; The Reign of Laic: a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, 1900; The 
Mettle of the Pasture, 1903; The Bride of the Mistletoe, 1909; The Doc- 
tor's Christmas Eve, 1910; A Heroine in Bronze, 1912. 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY 383 

Hamlin Oakland. {I860 .) Main-Traveled Roads: Six Missis- 
sippi Valley Stories, 1891; Jason Edwards: an Average Man, 1892; Little 
Norsk; or, 01' Pap's Flaxen, 1892; Member of the Third House: a Dra- 
matic Story, 1892; A Spoil of Office: a Story of the Modern West, 1892; 
Prairie Folks: or. Pioneer Life on the Western Prairies, in Nine Stories, 
1893; Prairie Songs, 1893; Crumbling Idols: Essays on Art, Dealing 
Chiefly ivith Literature, Painting, and the Drama, 1894; Rose of Dutcher's 
Coolly, 1895; Wayside Courtships, 1897; Ulysses S. Grant, His Life and 
Character, 1898; The Spirit of Siceetwater, 1898; Boy Life on the Prairie, 
1899; The Trail of the (1 old-Seekers: Record of Travel in Prose and Verse, 
1899; The Eagle's Heart, 1900; Her Mountain Lover, 1901; The Captain 
of the Grayhorse Troop, 1902; Hesper, 1903; The Light of the Star, 1904; 
The Tyranny of the Dark, 1905; Witch's Gold: New Version of the Spirit 
of Stillwater, 1906; Money Magic, 1907; The Long Trail, 1907; The 
Shadow World, 1908; Moccasin Ranch, a Story of Dakota, 1909; collected 
edition, ten volumes, 1909; Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, 1910; Other Main- 
Traveled Roads, 1910; Victor Ollnee's Discipline, 1911. 

Alice French, "Octave Thanet." (1850 .) Knitters in the Sun, 

1887; Expiation, 1890; We All, 1891; Otto the Knight and Other Trans- 
Mississippi Stories, 1891; Stories of a Westei-n Town, 1892; Adventures 
in Photography, 1893; The Missionary Sheriff: Incidents in the Life of a 
Plain Man Who Tried to Do His Duty, 1897; The Book of True Lovers, 
1897; The Heart of Toil, 1898; A Slave to Duty and Other Women, 1898; 
A Captured Dream and Other Stories, 1899; The Man of the Hour, 1905; 
The Lion's Share, 1907; By Inheritance, 1910; Stories That End WelU 
1911; A Step on the Stair, 1913. 

Rowland Evans Robinson. (1833-1900.) Uncle Lisha's Shop: Life 
in a Corner of Yankeeland, 1887; Sam Level's Camp: Uncle Lisha's 
Friends Under Bark and Canvas, 1889; Vermont: a Study in Independence, 
1892; Danvis Folks, 1894; In Neiv England Woods and Fields, 1890; Uncle 
Lisha's Outing, 1897; Hero of Ticonderoga, 1898; A Danvis Pioneer, 1900; 
Sam Level's Boy, 1901; In the Greenwood, 1904; Hunting Without a Gun 
and Other Papers, 1905; Out of Bondage and Other Stories, 1905. 

Philandee Deming. (1829 .) Adirondack Stories, 1880, 1886; 

Tompkins and Other Folks: Stories of the Hudson and the Adirondacks, 
1885. 

Ambrose Bierce. (1842-1914.) Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874; 
The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter [with Gustav Adolph Danzinger], 
1892; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [later changed to In the Midst of 
Life], 1892; Black Beetles in Amber, 1895; Can Such Things Be? 1894; 
Fantastic Fables, 1899; Shapes of Clay, 1903; The Cynic's Word Book, 
1906; Son of the Gods and a Horseman in the Sky, 1907; The Shadow on 
the Dial and Other Essatjs, 1909; Write It Right: Little Blacklist of Lit- 
erary Faults, 1909; Collected Works. Twelve Volumes. 1909-12. 

Richard Harding Davis. (1864-1916.) Gallagher and Other Stories, 
1891; Stories for Boys, 1891; Van Bibber and Others, 1892; The West 
from a Car Windoic, 1892; Rulers of the Mediterranean, 1894; Exiles and 
Other Stories, 1894; Our English Cousins, 1894; Princess Aline, 1895; 



384 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

About Paris, 1895; Cinderella and Other Stories, 1896; Three Gringos in 
Venezuela and Central America, 1896; Cuba in War Time, 1897; Soldiers 
of Fortune, 1897; A Year from a Reporter's Notebook, 1898; The King's 
Jackal, 1898; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1899; Novels and Stories, six 
volumes, 1899; With Both Aryvies in South Africa, 1900; In the Fog, 
1901; Captain Macklin, 1902; Hanson's Folly, 1902; The Bar Sinister, 
1904; Miss Civilization: a Comedy, 1905; Real Soldiers of Fortune, 1906; 
Farces, 1906; The Scarlet Car, 1907; The Congo and Coasts of Africa, 
1907; Vera, the Medium, 1908; White Mice, 1909; Once upon a Time, 
1910; The Dictator, a Farce, 1910; Galloper, a Comedy, 1910; The Consul, 
1911; The Man Who Could not Lose, 1911; The Red Cross Girl, 1912; The 
Lost Road, 1913; With the Allies, 1914. 



/ 



CHAPTER XVII 

SHIFTING CURRENTS OP FICTION 
I 

In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the 
Atlantic type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bon- 
ner's New York Ledger type, read openly by the literate masses 
and surreptitiously by many others. There was also a very 
large class of readers that read no novels at all. Puritanism 
had frowned upon fiction, the church generally discountenanced 
it, and in many places prejudice ran deep. George Gary Eggle- 
ston in the biography of his brother has recorded his own 
experience : 

It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the twen- 
tieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter of the nine- 
teenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice against novels as demor- 
alizing literature, and that even short stories were looked upon with 
doubt and suspicion. , . . When The Hoosier Schoolmaster began to 
appear, a member of the publishing house was sorely troubled. He 
had been a bitter and vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. 
He had published articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in 
rebuke of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth 
literature of that character. He now began to suspect that The 
Hoosier Schoolmaster was in fact a novel, and he was shocked at the 
thought that it was appearing in a ^periodical published by him- 
self. . . . "When the stoiy was about to appear in book form Edward 
wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the pubHsher referred to was again 
in a state of nervous agitation. He could in no wise consent to pro- 
claim himself as a publisher of novels. In view of the large advance 
orders for the book he was eager to publish the novel, but he could 
not reconcile himself to the open admission that it was a novel.^ 

While The Bread-Winners was running its anonymous course 
in the Century in 1884, its author, now known to have been John 
Hay, felt called upon to issue an explanatory note: 

1 The First of the Hoosiers, 343. See also the editorial on novel-reading 
Scribner'a Mo., 4:493. 

385 



386 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

I am engaged in business in wliicli my standing would be seriously 
compromised if it were known I had written a novel. I am sure that 
my practical efficiency is not lessened by this act, but I am equally 
sure that I could never recover from the injury it would occasion me 
if known among my own colleagues. For that positive reason, and 
for the negative one that I do not care for publicity, I resolved to keep 
the knowledge of my little venture in authorship restricted to as small 
a circle as possible. Only two persons besides myself know who wrote 
The B read-Winners. 

The final breaking dov^^n of this prejudice and the building 
up of the new clientele of readers that at length gave prose fic- 
tion its later enormous vogue is one of the most interesting 
phenomena of the period. The novel gained its present re- 
spectability as a literary form by what may be called an artifice. 
It came in disguised as moral instruction, as character-building 
studies of life, as historical narrative, as reform propaganda. 
Uncle Tom's Cahin, which had been read by thousands who had 
never opened a novel before, had begun the work. The Hoosier 
Schoolmaster was allowed to appear in the columns of Hearth 
and Home because it was a moral tale for children and because 
it was written by a minister whose motives no one could ques- 
tion. So with the works of the Rev. E. P. Roe, and the stories 
of Dr. J. G. Holland, who had gained an enormous following 
with his series of lay sermons published under the name of 
Timothy Titcomb. 

Perhaps Dr. Holland, more than any other writer of the time, 
is responsible for this rehabilitation of the novel. He under- 
stood the common people. His own origin had been humble — 
the son of a mechanic of western Massachusetts, blessed with 
poverty, educated through his own efforts, enabled after a long 
struggle to take a medical diploma — educator, school teacher, 
superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally, 
under Samuel Bowles, assistant editor of the Springfield, Massa- 
chusetts, Repuhlican, which, largely through his efforts, arose to 
national importance. He was forty when the Timothy Titcomb 
letters entered upon their enormous popularity — it is estimated 
that nearly half a million copies of the series were sold first and 
last; he was fifty when he established Scribner's Monthly and 
assumed its editorship. 

Scribner's under his direction became for the new period 
what the Atlantic Monthly had been for the period before. He 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 387 

was a moralist, a plain man of the people, and he knew his 
clientele; he knew the average American reader that makes up 
the great democratic mass, the reader who had bought The Wide, 
Wide World, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Titcomh Letters. 
He gave them first of all a serial novel by the Rev. George Mae- 
Donald, and he printed at the close of the first volume of the 
Monthly a letter from a reader, sample of thousands which had 
filled his mail. Here is an extract : 

I know of no writings better calculated than his [MacDonald's] to 
draw out what is noble and true in the reader, or call forth fine feelings 
and high resolves. They give impulse to life. We come away from 
reading one of his books stronger and better prepared for our life- 
work. Is not this the surest test of excellence in a book? 

It was this purpose that inspired his own fiction, Arthur 
Bonnicastle, Nicholas Mintur^i, and the others, earnest, moral 
tales sprinkled freely with sentiment, wholesome, but not high 
in literary merit. No other man did so much to direct the 
period into the well-known channels which it took. His whole 
influence was democratic. He would publish literature for the 
people, and to him literature was a serious thing, the voice of 
life. The group of new authors which he gathered about him 
is comparable only with the group that James T. Fields gath- 
ered about himself in the earlier golden days of the Atlantic. 

II 

The period of moralizing fiction culminated with the work of 
the Rev. Edward Payson Roe, whose first novel, Barriers Burned 
Away (1872), with its background of the great Chicago fire, and 
its tense moral atmosphere which skilfully concealed its sen- 
sationalism and its plentiful sentiment, became enormously 
popular. "When its author died in 1888 his publishers estimated 
that 1,400,000 copies of all his novels had been sold, not count- 
ing pirated editions in many foreign languages, and the sale of 
the books has been steady up to the present time. 

Roe, like Holland, had sprung from the common people and 
had been largely self-educated. For a time he had attended 
Williams College, Massachusetts, he had enlisted for the war as 
the chaplain of a regiment, and after the war had settled down 
as pastor of the First Church at Highland Falls, New York. 



388 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

After nine years his health failed him and he betook himself 
to an out-of-doors life, fruit raising at Cornwall-on-Hudson, 
and his experience he embodied in several practical handbooks 
like Success with Small Fruits, first published serially in Scrih- 
ner's. The last years of his life he gave to fiction, turning it 
out with facility and in quantity and always with the theory 
that he was thereby continuing his work as a pastor. "My 
books," he wrote, "are read by thousands; my voice reached at 
most but a few hundred. My object in writing, as in preaching, 
is to do good ; and the question is. Which can I do best ? I think 
with the pen, and I shall go on writing no matter what the critics 
say. "2 

That his novels are lacking in the higher elements of literary 
art, in structure and style and creative imagination, is apparent 
even to the uncritical, but that they are lacking in truth to life 
and power to move the reader no one can declare. At every 
point they are wholesome and manly. Roe's assertion that he 
worked with reverence in the fundamental stuff of life one must 
admit or else deny his contention that, "The chief evidence of 
life in a novel is the fact that it lives. ' ' ^ Surely it must be 
admitted that few novels of the period have shown more vitality. 

His influence has been considerable. With Holland and his 
school he helped greatly in the building up of that mass of novel 
readers, mostly women it must be said, which by the middle of 
the eighties had reached such enormous proportions. He led 
readers on to Lew W^allace's The Fair God and Ben Eur, and to 
the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who added to the con- 
ventional devices of Holland and Roe — sentiment, sensation, 
love-centered interest culminating inevitably in marriage at the 
close of the story — literary art and a certain dram^atic power. 
She was realistic in method, — her That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877) 
reproduced the Lancashire dialect in all its uncouthness — but the 
atmosphere of her work was romantic. Her Little Lord Faunt- 
leroy (1886), unquestionably the most successful juvenile of the 
period, has been described as "a fairy tale of real life." All of 
her books, indeed, have this fairy tale basis. She has been exceed- 
ingly popular, but she cannot be counted among the original 
forces of the period. From her the current of popularity flowed 

2 Roe's E. P. Roe. Reminiscences of His Life, 127. 

8 See E. P. Roe's "The Element of Life in Fiction." Forum, 5: 226. 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 389 

on to F. IMarion Crawford's cosmospolitan work, to Margaret 
Deland's strong problem novel John Ward, Preacher; then it 
swelled into a flood with David Ilarum and the historical novels 
that made notable the nineties. At the close of the century fic- 
tion was read by all and in quantities that seem incredible. 

Ill 

In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in dis- 
tinction from the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. 
Marion Crawford must be given a leading place. Of all Ameri- 
can writers he devoted himself most fully to the major form of 
fiction. He wrote forty-five novels, and few sketches and short 
stories: he was a novelist and only a novelist. He appeared at 
the one moment when the type of fiction which he represented 
was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book, Mr. 
Isaacs (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment — India, 
five years before Kipling made it his background ; it had a reli- 
gious atmosphere — the mystic beliefs of the Orient ; and it told 
a story with sentiment and with dramatic movement. Zoroas- 
ter, with its opening sentence, "The hall of the banquets was 
made ready for the feast in the palace of Babylon," appealed 
to an audience that had rated Ben Hitr among the greatest of 
novels. 

But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main 
current of his work. No two novelists could differ more radi- 
cally than he and Roe. To him the purpose-novel was a bastard 
thing unworthy the powers of a true artist. 

Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics generally belong 
to institutions set apart for especial purposes and carefully avoided, 
after a certain age, by the majority of those who wish to be amused. 
The purpose-novel is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lec- 
tures, to preach to people who prefer their own church, and to 
teach people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, 
a lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the social 
contract — and as such it ought to be either mercilessly crushed or 
forced by law to bind itself in black and label itself "Purpose" in very 
big letters.* 

The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only 
entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of 

*The iYove/: What It Is. 17.. 



390 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

art for art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket- 
stage" whose only office is to please. 

The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint 
which was singularly different from that held by the short story 
writers who were so busily exploiting provincial little neighbor- 
hoods in all the remote nooks and corners of the land. His 
training had given him an outlook more cosmopolitan than even 
that of Henry James. He had been born at Bagni-di-Lucca, 
in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and he had 
spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had 
studied at Concord, New Hampshire ; at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge ; at Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg ; and finally at Rome, where 
he had specialized in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allaha- 
bad, India, connected with the Indian Herald, and later on, his 
health failing, he visited his uncle in New York, Samuel Ward, 
brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice threw some of 
his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The instant 
success of Mr. Isaacs determined his career. After extensive 
travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a 
picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he 
spent the remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary 
productivity, and of growing popularity with readers both in 
America and in Europe. 

No other American novelist has ever covered so much of ter- 
ritory. He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, 
in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and ludia, 
and he wrote with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing 
with times and places as diverse as Persia in the times of 
Zoroaster; as the second crusade — Via Crucis; as the era of 
Philip II in Spain — In the Palace of the King; as Venice in the 
Middle Ages — Marietta, a Maid of Venice; as early Arabia — 
Kahled; and as early Constantinople — Arethusa. 

The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen 
novels that deal with life in Rome and its environs: Sara- 
cinesca, Sant' Ilario, Don Orsino, Taquisara, Corleone, Casa 
Braccio, A Roman Singer, Marzio's Crucifix, Heart of Rome, 
Cecilia, Whosoever Shall Offend, Pietro Ghisleri, To Leeward, 
A Lady of Rome, and The White Sister. The novels deal almost 
exclusively with the middle and higher classes of Rome, classes 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 391 

of which most Americans know nothing at all, for, to quote from 
the opening chapter of To Leeward: 

There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent for- 
eigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways, hotels, typhoid 
fever, incense, and wax candles; and there is the Rome within, a city 
of antique customs, good and bad, a town full of aristocratic preju- 
dices, of intrigues, of religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fash- 
ioned scandal, of happiness and unhappiness, of just people and 
unjust. 

It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, 
unknown to any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he 
has shown us, as Howells attempted to show the social life of 
Boston and New England, and as Cable sought to enter the heart 
of Creole New Orleans. With what success? Those who know 
most of Roman life have spoken with praise. He has given to 
his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say ; too much 
of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet on 
the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought 
to reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston 
or Cable to New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside 
as one native born, as one reared in the society he describes, even 
to the detail of accepting its religious belief. One may well 
believe it, for everywhere in the novels is the perfection of natu- 
ralness, the atmosphere of reality. 

With his seven stories of American life. An American Poli- 
tician and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a 
foreigner, as an observer of the outward with no fullness of 
sympathy, no depth of knowledge. He was European in view- 
point and in experience, and he knew better the European back- 
ground — Germany as in Grcifenstcin and The Cigarette-Maker's 
Romance, or England as in The Tale of a Lonely Parish, or even 
Constantinople as in Paul Patoff. 

He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of 
the surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan 
comparisons, wisdom from ever.ywhere, modern instances from 
Stamboul and Allahabad and Rome. To read him is like walk- 
ing through foreign scenes with a fully informed guide, a mar 
velous guide, indeed, a patrician, a polished man of the world. 
Everywhere in his work an atmosphere of good breeding — 



392 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

charming people of culture and wideness of experience: diplo- 
mats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of the world and 
ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no uncouth 
characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established 
institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In 
the telling of the tale he has but a single purpose: 

We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine play- 
w^riters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are not clever 
enough, since a successful play is incomparably more lucrative than 
a successful novel. We are not preachers, and few of us would be 
admitted to the pulpit. We are not, as a class, teachers or professors, 
nor lawyers, nor men of business. We are nothing more than public 
amusers. Unless we choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, 
accept our position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our 
mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too imposing for 
it to bear, and without degTading it by bringing its productions down 
even a little way, from the lowest level of high comedy to the highest 
level of buffoonery.5 

From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has 
told his stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. 
Slight though his stories may often be in development, they are 
ingenious always in construction and they are cumulative in 
interest. He has undoubted dramatic power, sparkling dia- 
logue, thrust and parry, whole novels like Saracinesca, for in- 
stance, that might be transferred to the stage with scarcely an 
alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him always 
from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is 
a species of drama : 

It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past hundred 
years, found the way of carrying a theater in its pocket; and so long 
as humanity remains what it is, it will delight in taking out its pocket- 
stage and watching the antics of the actors, who are so like itself and 
yet so much more interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best an- 
swer to the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a 
pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are made 
of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly put together. 
A play is good in proportion as it represents the more dramatic, pas- 
sionate, romantic, or humorous sides of real life. A novel is excellent 
according to the degree in which it produces the illusions of a good 
play — but it must not be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that 
illusion is eminently necessary to success.^ 

5 The Novel: What It Is. 22, 40. 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 393 

Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melo- 
dramatic; we lose the impression of real life and feel an atmos- 
phere of staginess, that exaggeration of effect which thrills for 
a moment and then disgusts. 

And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he 
works without deep emotion, without tenderness, without altru- 
ism, without the higher reaches of imagination. He has no 
social or moral purpose, as Howells had. He sees the body 
but not the soul, society rather than life in its deeper cur- 
rents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and 
its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks 
little below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. 
He is inferior to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks 
humor, he lacks heart. He is inferior to James and George 
Meredith inasmuch as he had no power of introspection and no 
distinctive style. He had no passion — he never becomes enthu- 
siastic even about his native Italy; he had little love for nature 
— the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes. 
He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring 
amusement for the present moment. 

He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization 
of the novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is 
clear and natural, but it is also without distinction. His pic- 
tures are vividly drawn and his stories are exceedingly readable 
• — journalistic excellences, but there is nothing of inspiration 
about them, no breath of genius, no touch of literature in the 
stricter sense of that word. Like every skilful journalistic 
writer, he has the power to visualize his scene, to paint charac- 
ters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out. Notably 
was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip 
II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and 
women that move and convince. He has created a marvelous 
gallery of characters, taking his forty-five novels together, com- 
plex and varied beyond that produced by any other American 
novelist, and there are surprisingly few repetitions. He stands 
undoubtedly as the most brilliant of the American writers of 
fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most entertaining. His 
galaxy of Roman novels, especially the Saracincsca group, bids 
fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of human 
life and that are more inspired products of literary art. 



394 AMEEICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

IV 

The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, 
as in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who 
came into literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Un- 
like Crawford, she was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within 
a narrow provincial area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer 
materials of life, the problems of the soul. 

The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and 
reared at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swal- 
lowed up by the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she 
went at sixteen to New York to study drawing and design at 
Cooper Institute; and after her graduation she became in- 
structor in design at the Girls' Normal College, New York City. 
In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and removed to 
Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued her first 
book — a collection of poems entitled An Old Garden, and two 
years later John Ward, Preacher, a novel that attracted instant 
and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to 
Robert Elsmere, then at the height of its enormous vogue. 
Since that time she has published four other major novels: 
Sidney, Philip and His Wife, The Awakening of Helena Richie, 
and The Iron Woman, and many short stories, notably the col- 
lections entitled The Wisdom of Fools, Old Chester Tales, and 
Dr. Lavendar's People. 

By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious 
and contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be 
immortalized as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place 
of traditions, a bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of 
well-bred old English and Scotch and Irish families with deep 
religious prejudices and with narrow yet wholesome and kindly 
ideals. She was reared in a religious atmosphere — her father 
was a Presbyterian and her mother an Episcopalian, the com- 
bination so disastrous in John Ward, Preacher. She lived amid 
books, all of which she might read save only the novels, a pro- 
hibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last she w^as 
led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no con- 
ventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, 
of concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tra- 
dition of the elders. It was an environment that cultivated the 
poet as well as the Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 395 

Nature, the deeps of love and life that were to find expression 
in a note like this, recorded in her first volume: 

distant Christ, the crowded, darkening years 
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me : 
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee, 

But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears. 

My gToping hands would touch thy garment's hem. 
Would find some token thou art walking near; 
Instead, they clasp but empty darkness drear. 

And no diviner hands reach out to them. 

My straining eyes, Christ, but long to mark 
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet. 
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet, 

Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark. 

It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both 
serious and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. 
In John Ward, Preacher, she took as her theme the revolt of a 
soul against the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not 
necessarily a religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The pri- 
mary motif of Robert Elsmere is theological and doctrinal dis- 
cussion. It is religious polemic made attractive by being cast 
into story form and as such it deserves the anathema of Craw- 
ford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human interest is para- 
mount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives, just as 
jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other 
human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions 
under the stress. 

So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the 
redemption of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a 
character through some immaterial force applied from within. 
She deals with great ethical and sociological forces: heredity, 
as in her novelette The Hands of Esau; divorce, as in The Iron 
Wofjian; the compelling power of love, as in Sidney. Her 
primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte, simply to 
entertain ; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own view, 
to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be 
purged through fear of what may be — the aim indeed of the 
Greek drama. Her equipment for the work was complete. To 
feminine tenderness and insight she added a depth of view and 



396 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

an analysis that is masculine. She was a poet too, but a poet 
with the severity of form and the moving realism of the short 
story writer. Two of her novels, The Awakening of Helena 
Richie and The Iron Woman, have not been surpassed in con- 
struction and in moving power by any other writer of the 
period. 

Her Old Chester Tales also, with their central figure Dr. 
Lavendar, have the elements that make for permanence. They 
are really without time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is 
in western Pennsylvania, the author's native town, but it might 
be New England as well. The tales deal with universal types 
and with universal motifs with a broadness and a sympathy and 
a literary art that raises them into the realm of the rarer classics. 
From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to place beside 
even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon ; humanity 
is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual 
life touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From 
that worldly social area of life presented to us by such latter- 
day novelists as Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert 
Chambers they are as far removed as is a fashionable Newport 
yacht, with its club-centered men and cigarette-smoking women, 
from the simple little hamlet among the hills. 



During the closing years of the century there came into 
American literature, suddenly and unheralded, a group of young 
men, journalists for the most part, who for a time seemed to 
promise revolution. They brought in with a rush enthusiasm, 
vigor, vitality; they had no reverence for old forms or old 
ideals; they wrote with fierceness and cocksureness books like 
Garland's Crumhling Idols and Norris's The Responsibilities of 
the Novelist, which called shrilly for Truth, Truth: "Is it 
not, in Heaven's name, essential that the people hear not a lie, 
but the Truth? If the novel were not one of the most im- 
portant factors of life ; if it were not the completest expression 
of our civilization; if its influence were not greater than all 
the pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would 
not be so important that its message should be true." They 
would produce a new American literature, one stripped of 
prudishness and convention ; they would go down among the 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 397 

People aud tell them the plain God's Truth as Zola defined 
Truth, for the People were hungry for it. "In the larger view, 
in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. 
The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured, and vili- 
fied, are, after all, and in the main, the real seekers after Truth." 
The group was a passing phenomenon. Many of its members 
were dead before they had done more than outline their work: 
Wolcott Balestier and Stephen Crane at thirty, Frank Norris at 
thirty-two, Henry Harland and Harold Frederic in the early 
forties, and the others, like R. H. Davis, for instance, turned at 
length to historical romance and other conventional fields. 

The impetus undoubtedly came from the enormous and sud- 
den vogue of Kipling. Balestier was his brother-in-law and 
had collaborated with him in writing The Naulahka. Then he 
had written the novel Benefits Forgot, a work of remarkable 
promise, but remarkable only for its promise. The vigor and 
directness and picturing power of the young Kipling were quali- 
ties that appealed strongly to young men of journalistic train- 
ing. Like him, they were cosmopolitans and had seen unusual 
areas of life. Crane had represented his paper in the Greco- 
Turkish War and in the Cuban campaign, Norris had been in 
the South African War, Richard Harding Davis had been at all 
the storm centers of his time, Frederic was the European cor- 
respondent of the New York Times, and Harland became at 
length editor of the London Yellow Book. 

The genius of the group undoubtedly was Stephen Crane 
(1871-1900). He was frail of physique, neurotic, intense, full 
of a vibrant energy that drove him too fiercely. He was natu- 
rally lyrical, romantic, impulsively creative, but his training 
made him, as it made most of the group, a realist — a depressed 
realist after Zola. His earliest work was his best, Maggie, a 
Girl of the Streets, a grim and brutal picture of the darker 
strata of New York City — his most distinctive creation. But 
he had no patience, no time, for collecting material. He was 
too eager, too much under the dominance of moods, to investi- 
gate, and his later novel. The Red Badge of Courage, which pur- 
ports to be a realistic story of army life in the Civil War, is 
based upon a kind of manufactured realism that is the product 
not of observation or of gathered data, but of an excessively 
active imagination. When he died, though he was but thirty, 



398 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

he had done his work. Despite his lyrical power and his un- 
doubted imagination, his place is not large. 

For Frank Norris (1870-1902) more may be said, though un- 
doubtedly he has been judged by his contemporaries more by 
what he dreamed of doing and what, perhaps, he might have 
done had he lived than by his actual accomplishment. He had 
had unusual training for the epic task he set himself. He had 
been born in Chicago and had spent there the first fifteen years 
of his life, he had been educated in the San Francisco high 
school, at the University of California, and at Harvard, then 
for a year or two he had studied art in Paris. Later he was war 
correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, then editor of 
the San Francisco Wave, then special war correspondent for 
McClure's Magazine during the Spanish War. 

When he began to write fiction, and he began early, he was an 
ardent disciple of Zola, a realist of the latter-day type, a teller 
of the Truth as Zola conceived of the Truth. "Mere literature" 
was a thing outworn, graces of style and gentleness of theme 
belonged to the effeminate past. A masculine age had come 
to which nothing was common or unclean provided it were but 
the Truth. Like Crane, he was eager, excited, dominated by 
his theme until it became his whole life. He could work only 
in major key, in fortissimo, with themes continent-wide pre- 
sented with the Kipling vigor and swing. 

In his earlier work, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and 
the like, he swung to the extreme of his theory. To tell the 
truth was to tell with microscopic detail the repulsive things of 
physical life. There are stories of his that reek with foul odors 
and jangle repulsively upon the eye and the ear. The short 
fiction "A Man's Woman" is an advance even upon Zola. It 
is Truth, but it is the truth about the processes of the sewer 
and the physiological facts about starvation: 

The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of moldy 
gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of 
stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that 
exhaled from the tent cover — every smell but that of food. 

McTeague is a brutal book: it gets hold of one's imagination 
and haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain 
scenes from Vandover and the Brute. One sees for weeks the 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 399 

ghastly face of that drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the 
steamer, was beaten off again and again until his mashed fingers 
could no longer gain a hold. True to life it undoubtedly is, but 
to what end? 

Norris's master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the 
wheat, the allegory of financial and industrial America. He ex- 
plained his purpose in the preface to The Pit: 

These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way connected 
with each other save by their relation to (1) the production, (2) the 
distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When com- 
plete they will form the stoiy of a crop of wheat from the time of 
its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as 
bread in a village of Western Europe. 

The first novel, The Octopus, deals with the war between the wheat 
grower and the Railroad Trust; the second. The Pit, is the fictitious 
narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third. The 
Wolf, will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a 
famine in an old world commmiity. 

He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these 
two that his place as a novelist must depend. They represent 
his maturer work, his final manner, and they undoubtedly show 
what would have been his product had he been spared to com- 
plete his work. 

The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. 
The whole continent seems to be in them. They have an un- 
tamed power, an elemental quality, an unconfined sweep that is 
Russian in its quality. They are epics, epics of a new continent 
with its untold richness in corn and wheat, its enmeshing rail- 
roads, its teeming cities of the plain, its restless human types — 
new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the enthusiasm 
of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be 
filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the 
railroad yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly 
with Hugo-like adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism 
that at times takes full control. The railroad dominates The 
Octopus, the wheat The Pit as fully as the hemp dominates 
Allen's Reign of Law. The books are allegories. The Western 
farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like monster, the railroad, 
that is strangling him. Tbe ghastly horror of the locomotive 
that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is symbolic of 
his helplessness. 



400 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little 
bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; 
brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the 
bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible; the black blood, 
winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with 
a long sucking murmur. . , , Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imag- 
ination the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its 
single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw 
it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo 
of its thmider over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and 
destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching 
into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, 
the Colossus, the Octopus. 

Garland in such pictures as "Under the Lion's Paw" tends 
to arouse his reader to mutiny, to the cry "This thing must 
stop!" Norris fills him vi^ith shuddering horror and leaves him 
unnerved. 

Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth 
too, so far as it goes. They have imaginative power of no in- 
ferior type and an ardor that is contagious. It was worth 
while to have written them: they picture for all time a unique 
phase of American life, but it is no great loss to our literature 
that the two were not expanded into a long series. In the 
higher sense of the word they are not literature; they are re- 
markably well done newspaper "stories." Like most of the 
work of his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and 
in intent: stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of un- 
usual material, timely studies in dynamic style. But literary 
art is founded upon restraint, reserve, poise. These stories 
lack finish, concentration, and even, at times, good taste. 
Everywhere full organ, everywhere tenseness, everywhere ex- 
citement. A terrible directness there is, but it tends no whither 
and it comes to no terminus of conclusion. 

Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most 
fundamental areas of human life. He was too insistently mod- 
ern. Like the mere journalist, he was obsessed with but a single 
thought: the value of the present moment. He lacked a sense 
of the past, personal background, inner life, power to weigh 
and balance and compare, and, lacking these, he lacked the ele- 
ments that make for the literature of permanence. 

Henry Harland's (1861-1905) earliest work, As It Was Writ- 
ten (1885), Mrs. Peixada, and The Yoke of the Thora (1887). 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 401 

written under the pen name "Sidney Luska," presented cer- 
tain phases of Jewish life and character in New York with a 
grim power that seemed promising, but his later work was 
decadent. Harold Frederic was a more substantial figure; A 
typical American, self-made and self-educated, climbing by 
rapid stages from the positions of farm hand, photographer, and 
proof-reader to the editorship of influential papers like the Al- 
bany Journal, at twenty-eight he was the European representa- 
tive of the New York Times and an international correspondent 
of rare power. Novel-writing he took up as a recreation. His 
earliest work, which appeared in Scribner's Magazine, Seth's 
Brother's Wife (1887), was a novel of New York farm life, 
Garland-like in its depressing realism. Later stories like In the 
Valley and The Copperhead dealt wnth a background of the 
Civil War. His greatest success came with The Damnation of 
Theron Ware, published in England with the title Illumination, 
a remarkable book especially in its earlier chapters, full of vigor 
and truth. Undoubtedly he possessed the rare gift of story- 
telling, and had he, like Crawford, devoted himself wholly to 
the art, he might have done work to compare with any other 
written during the period. But he was a journalist with news- 
paper standards, he worked in haste, he lacked repose and the 
sense of values, and as a result a republication of his novels 
has not been called for. He is to be ranked with Crane and 
Norris as a meteor of brilliance rather than a fixed light. 

VI 

The new realism was short lived. Even while its propa- 
ganda like Crumhling Idols and The Responsibilities of the 
Novelist were spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead 
and that the god of things as they are had come in his power, 
a new romantic period already had begun. Maurice Thomp- 
son, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the period, wrote in 
May, 1900: 

Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward 
a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however, point 
to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of character analysis 
and social problems to the historical novel and the romance of heroic 
adventure. We have had a period of intense, not to say morbid, in- 
troversion directed mainly upon diseases of the social, domestic, po- 



402 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

litical, and religious life of the world. It may be that, like all other 
currents of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush 
of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its course. . . . 
Great commercial interest seems to be turned or turning from the 
world of commonplace life and the story of the analysis of crime and 
filth to the historical romance, the story of heroism, and the tale of 
adventure. People seem to be interested as never before in the inter- 
pretation of history. It may be that signs in the air of great world 
changes have set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents 
and examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.'^ 

The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was 
wider than America, have been variously estimated. Harold 
Frederic suggested Blackmore as the possible fountain head. 
"Was it Lorna Doone, I wonder, that changed the drift in his 
torical fiction ? The book, after it was once introduced to public 
attention by that comic accident which no one can blame Mr. 
Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved, as it deserved, 
one of the great successes of our time — and great successes set 
men thinking. ' ' ' Paul Leicester Ford, himself an historian 
and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined to 
another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there 
seems a revival of interest in American history, and the novelist 
has been quickly responsive to it."^ The English critic E. A. 
Bennett offered still another solution: "America is a land of 
crazes. In other words, it is simple : no derision is im- 
plied. . . . And America is also a land of sentimentalism. It 
is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the 
vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the his- 
torical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously 
in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced 
distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural 
and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of 
verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still ob- 
tains that human nature was different 'in those days'; that the 
good old times were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates 
poetically just." ^ 

Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate out- 
burst at the close of the century to a new interest in American 

6 The Independent, 52:1182. 

7 The Bookman, 8:330. 

8 The Atlantic, 80:720. 

B E. A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction, page 163. 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 403 

history. The war with Spain brought about a burst of 
patriotism and of martial feeling that made the swashbuckling 
romance and the episode from the American Revolution seem 
peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the only 
cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the ex- 
cess of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence 
of Stevenson must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of 
his age, had sickened early of the realistic, the analytic, the 
problematic. 

"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to Henley 
as early as 1884, "a romance — and no man will get or write me one. 
Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, and I am short. 
I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; 
a book, I guess, like Treasure Island. . . . Oh, my sighings after ro- 
mance, or even Skeltery, and ! the weary age wMch will produce me * 
neither ! 

"'Chapter I 

" 'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horse- 
man, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Com- 
mon, had not met a traveler, when the sound of wheels. . . .' 

" 'Chapter II 

« I "Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay 
a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks." 

" ' "She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly. 

" ' "They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the 
old salt. "We shall soon know more of her." 

" ' "Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. 
Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff." 

" ' "God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.' " 

Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was 
the dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, 
editor of the Atlantic, could write of "the present passion for 
historical novels." To what extent they were a passion may 
be learned from the records of publishers. By the summer of 
1901, Ford's Janice Meredith had sold 275,000 copies, Mary 
Johnston's To Have and to Hold, 285,000, and Churchill's The 
Crisis, 320,000, and bis Richard Carvel, 420,000. ^^ One might 
give equally large figures for such favorites as Charles IMajor's 
When Knighthood Was in Flower, Tarkington's Monsieur 
Beaiicaire, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, Thompson's 

10 Halsey, Our Literary Deluge, page 24. 



404 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Alice of Old Vincennes, and very many others, foreign as well 
as American. 

The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical 
element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. 
Of the former class Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith is, 
perhaps, the best type; of the latter, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. 
Ford was first of all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver 
among historical sources. He had been educated in his father's 
library, which contained the finest collection of Americana in 
the world, and at twelve we find him publishing on his own 
press a genealogy of Webster of his own compilation. His later 
bibliographical and historical work centered about the Ameri- 
can Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a his- 
torian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters 
and real areas of American life. The Honorable Peter Stirling 
was a study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland 
as the central figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and 
truthful, and even though a fiction it is a valuable historical 
document. So it was with Janice Meredith, a historian's day- 
dream over his Americana. It presents an accurate picture of 
the social conditions of its time. Many of its characters are 
revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central figure — "The 
true George Washington," presented with all his failings as 
well as with all his excellences. 

It was natural that Ford should make much of the material 
that he knew so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its 
own sake rather than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly 
he falsified history by making his real personages, like Wash- 
ington and Franklin, take part in conversations that never oc- 
curred and do things that strictly never were done, but it is 
equally true that he has given us the best conception that is 
now possible of how it must have felt to live in the days of the 
Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and vivacity, 
and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist en- 
amoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of 
romance. His faults all centered about his undoubted de- 
ficiency in literary art: he lacked constructive power and dis- 
tinction of style. His stories are the diversions of a professional 
historian, brilliant but without promise of permanence. 

Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 405 

of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. 
Dr. Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, 
and like Dr. Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely 
to his profession. He was fifty-three and one of the leading 
world specialists on nervous diseases when he wrote his first 
full novel, In War Time. His own explanation, given in later 
years to a gathering of University of Pennsylvania men, has 
often been quoted: 

When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long summer 
holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would have made entire 
idleness mere ennui. I turned to what, except for stern need, would 
have been my lifelong work from youth — literature — bored by idleness, 
wrote my first novel. 

The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry 
all his life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to 
Stoddard and the other poets of beauty. In later years he pub- 
lished many volumes of it and contributed it to the magazines, 
but never for money. It explains much in his work. No other 
novelist of the period has so filled his fiction with quoted lyrics 
and with Ij^rical prose. It is here that he differs from writers 
like Ford and Norris: he would produce literature. 

His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and 
also his last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served 
three years as a surgeon. Then, like Dr. Hohnes, he wrote 
pathological studies on which he brought to bear his vast medi- 
cal knowledge, novels like Dr. North and His Friends and Con- 
stance Trescott; he wrote brilliant tales of French life, like The 
Adventures of Frangois, Dr. Mitchell's favorite among his 
novels, and A Diplomatic Adventure; he wrote idyllic studies 
of Nature like When All the Woods Are Green, and Far in the 
Forest, and, best of all, the historical romances Hugh Wynne, 
Free Quaker, and The Red City. 

These novels more than any others written during the period 
are products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the ma- 
terials of which they are woven. We feel at every point that 
we are in the hands of an expert, the ablest neurologist of his 
generation, who has seen intimately vast areas of life of which 
the average reader knows nothing. His analysis of a character 
has the exactness of a clinic and he adds to it, moreover, an 



406 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

imaginative power that makes us see as well as know and feel. 
He is skilful in characterization, "Character," he once wrote, 
"is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without much 
explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If 
I fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not 
failed. Octavia Blake in the novel Roland Blake is drawn with 
peculiar skill ; so is Lueretia Hunter in Circumstance, so is Con- 
stance Trescott, that study of over-devotion. Always is he best 
in his studies of femininity, doubtless because women had played 
so large a part in his medical practice. 

With few exceptions his characters are from the higher 
classes, "gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel Dr. North, 
and he has made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and 
even James. He has discussed the point himself: "Nor can I 
tell why some men can not create gentlefolk. It is not knowl- 
edge, nor is it the being in or of their world that gives this 
power. Thackeray had it ; so had Trollope ; Dickens never ; nor, 
in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this respect; 
and of the living I shall say nothing. ' ' ^^ We feel this quality 
most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately his 
background. Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, 
and he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmos- 
pliere of old Second Street, in the days when it contained the 
most distinctive social set in America. He was a part of it; 
he wrote as if he were writing his own family history, lovingly, 
reverently. He was writing romance, but he was writing it as 
one who is on sacred historical ground where error of fact or of 
inference is unpardonable. He has himself outlined the work 
of the historical romancer: 

Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character amid 
the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose, for in- 
stance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For years I must study 
the topography, dress, manners, and family histories; must be able in 
mind to visit this or that house ; know where to call, whom I shall see, 
the hours of meals, the diet, games, etc. I must know what people 
say on meeting and parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so 
on, to get the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography, 
to command the written style of the day. Most men who write thus 
of another time try to give the effect of actuality by an excessive use 
of archaic forms. Only enough should be used to keep from time 
to time some touch of this past, and not so much as to distract inces- 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 407 

santly by needless reminders. It is an art, and, like all good art ef- 
fects, it escapes complete analysis. 

Then as to the use of historical characters. These must naturally 
influence the fate of your puppets; they must never be themselves the 
most prominent personages of your story.^^ 

He presents his material with skill: he is a story-teller; his 
plots move strongly and always by means not of explanations 
but of the self-development of his characters. Even his most 
minor figures form a distinct part of the movement. His style 
has more of distinction than has any other of the later ro- 
mancers. He brought to his work the older ideals of literary 
form and expression, and he wrought not with the haste of the 
journalist and special correspondent, but with the leisure of 
the deliberate man of letters. Without question he is as large 
a figure in his period as Dr. Holmes was in his, and there are 
those who would rank him as the greater of the two. That he 
has not been given a more commanding place is due undoubtedly 
to his great fame as a medical expert. The physician has over- 
shadowed the author. 

VII 

The enormous quantity and richness of the fiction of the 
period make impossible extended criticism of any save those 
who were leaders or innovators. Many did most excellent work, 
work indeed in some cases that seems to point to permanence, 
yet since they brought nothing new either in material or in 
method we need not dwell long upon them. 

No type of fiction, for instance, was more abundant all 
through the period than that which we have called the E. P. 
Roe type, and the most voluminous producer of it undoubtedly 
was Captain, later General, Charles King, who created no fewer 
than fifty-five novels of the half-sensational, half-sentimental 
type which we associate with the name of Roe. With his wide 
knowledge of army life, especially as lived in tlie frontier camps 
of the West after the Civil War, he was able to give his work 
a verisimilitude that added greatly to their popularity. The 
love story was skilfully blended with what seemed to be real 
history. The frontier stories of Mary Hallock Foote, wife of 
a civil engineer whose work called him into the mining camps 

nDr. 'North and His Friends. Chapter 16. 



408 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

of Colorado and Idaho, have the same characteristics. Their 
author, a clever illustrator, was able to extend her art to her 
descriptions of the primitive regions and savage humanity of 
the frontier, and for a time she was compared even with Bret 
Harte. But not for long. Her books, save for their novelty 
of setting, have no characteristics that are not conventional. 
Better is the work of Clara Louise Burnham. There is in her 
fiction more of imaginative power and more command of the 
subtleties of style, but even her best efforts fall far short of 
distinction. 

Of the romancers of the period the leader for a time un- 
questionably was Julian Hawthorne, only son of the greatest of 
American romancers. In his earlier days he devoted himself 
to themes worthy of the Hawthorne name and treated them in 
what fairly may be called the Hawthorne manner. His novels, 
like Bressant and Archibald Malmaison, were hailed everywhere 
as remarkably promising work and there were many who pre- 
dicted for him a place second only to his father's. But the man 
lacked seriousness, conscience, depth of life, knowledge of the 
human heart. After a short period of worthy endeavor he 
turned to the sensational and the trivial, and became a yellow 
journalist. No literary career seemingly so promising has ever 
failed more dismally. 

Stronger romancers by far have been Blanche Willis Howard, 
Frederick J. Stimson, and Arthur Sherburne Hardy. Few 
American women have been more brilliant than Miss Howard. 
Her One Summer has a sprightliness and a humor about it that 
are perennial, and her Breton romance Guenn is among the 
greatest romances of the period in either England or America. 
The spirit of true romance breathes from it ; and it came alive 
from its creator's heart and life. So far does it surpass all her 
other work that she is rated more and more now as a single- 
work artist. She passed her last years away from America in 
Stuttgart, where her husband, Herr von Teuffel, was acting as 
court physician to the king of Wiirtemberg. Hardy also was a 
romancer, a stylist of the French type, brilliant, finished. Few 
have ever brought to fiction a mind more keenly alert and more 
analytical. He was a mathematician of note, a writer of 
treatises on least squares and quarternions. But he was a poet 
as well and a romancer. His But yet a Woman has an atmos- 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 409 

phere about it that is rarely found in literature in English. 
His Passe Rose is the most idealistic of all the historical ro- 
mances: it moves like a prose poem. Stimson too had artistic 
imagination, grace of style of the old type joined to the fresh- 
ness and vigor of the new period. It is to be regretted that he 
chose to devote himself to the law and write legal treatises that 
are everywhere recognized as authoritative rather than to do 
highly distinctive work in the more creative field of prose 
romance. None of these writers may be said to have added 
anything really new to the province in which they worked and 
so may be dismissed with a brief comment. They worked in old 
material with old methods and largely with old ideals, and 
though they worked often with surpassing skill, they were fol- 
lowers rather than leaders. 

Several novels made much stir in the day of their first ap- 
pearance, Bellamy's Looking Backward, for instance, John 
Hay's The Bread-Winners (1884), and Fuller's The Cliff 
Dwellers, that picture of Chicago life that for a time was thought 
to be as promising as Frank Norris's realistic work. Robert 
Grant's humorous and sprightly studies of society and life were 
also at various times much discussed, but all of them are seen 
now to have been written for their own generation alone. AVith 
every decade almost there comes a newness that for a time is 
supposed to put into eclipse even the fixed stars. A quarter of 
a century, however, tells the story. The Norwegian scholar and 
poet and novelist Boyesen, who did what Howells really did 
not do, take Tolstoy as his master, was thought for two decades 
to be of highest rank, but to-day his work, save for certain sec- 
tions of his critical studies, is no longer read. 

Even F. Hopkinson Smith is too near just at present for us 
to prophesy with confidence, yet it is hard to believe that his 
Colonel Carter is to be forgotten, and there are other parts 
of his work, like Tom Grogan and Caleb West, books that cen- 
tered about his profession of lighthouse architect, that seem 
now like permanent additions to American fiction. There was a 
breeziness about his style, a cosmopolitanism, a sense of knowl- 
edge and authority that is most convincing. Some of his short 
stories, like those for instance in At Close Bange — "A Night 
Out," to be still more specific — have a picturing power, a per- 
^^ct naturalness, an accuracy of diction, that mark them as 



410 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

triumphs of realism in its best sense. Like Dr. Mitchell, he came 
late to literature, but when he did come he came strongly, laden 
with a wealth of materials, and he has left behind him a hand- 
ful at least of novels and studies that bid fair to endure long, 

VIII 

Of the younger group of novelists, those writers born in the 
sixties and early seventies and publishing their first novels dur- 
ing the first decade of the new century, we shall say little. The 
new spirit of nationality that came in the seventies did not fur- 
nish the impulse that produced the work of this second genera- 
tion of the period. It is a school of novelists distinct and by 
itself. We may only call the roll of its leaders, arranging it, 
perhaps, in the order of seniority: Gertrude Franklin Ather- 

ton (1859 ), Bliss Perry (1860 ), Owen Wister 

(1860-^), John Fox, Jr. (1863 ), Holman F. Day 

(1865 ), Robert W. Chambers (1865 ), Meredith 

Nicholson (1866 ), David Graham Philips (1867-1911), 

Robert Herrick (1868 ), Newton Booth Tarkiugton 

(1869 ), Mary Johnston (1870 ), Edith Wharton ( ), 

Alice Hegan Rice (1870 ), Winston Churchill (1871 ), 

Stewart Edward White (1873 ), Ellen Anderson Glasgow 

(1874 ), Jack London (1876-1916). The earlier work of 

some of these writers falls under classifications which we have 
already discussed, as for instance Churchill's Richard Carvel, 
Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope, Chambers's Cardigan, and 
Wister 's The Virginian. Of the great mass of the fiction of the 
group, however, and of a still younger group we shall say noth- 
ing. It was not inspired by the impulse that in the sixties and 
the seventies produced the National Period. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

JosTAH Gilbert Holland. (1819-1881.) History of Western Massa- 
chusetts, 1855; The Bay Path, 1857; Bitter-Sweet [a poem], 1858; Let- 
ters to Young People, 1858; Gold Foil, 1859; Miss Gilbert's Career, 1860; 
Lessons in Life, 1861; Letter to the Joneses, 1863; Plain Talks on Familiar 
i^uhjects, 1865; Life of Lincoln, 1865; Kathrina [a poem], 1867; The 
Marble Prophecy, 1872; Arthur Bonnicastle, 1873; Garnered Sheaves, 1873; 
Mistress of the Manse, 1874; Seven Oals, 1875; Nicholas Minturn, 1877; 
Every-Day Topics (two series), 1876, 1882. 

Edward Payson Roe. (1838-1888.) Barriers Burned Away, 1872; 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 411 

What Can She Do? 1873; The Opening of a Chestnut Burr, 1874; From 
Jest to Earnest, 1875; Near to Nature's Heart, ISTi; A Knight of the 
Nineteenth Century, 1877; A Face Illumined, 1878; A Day of Fate, 1880; 
Without a Home, 1881; His Somber Rivals, 1883; An Unexpected Result, 
1883; Nature's Serial Story, 1884; A Young Girl's Wooing, 1884; Driven 
Back to Eden, 1885; An Original Belle, 1885; He Fell in Love with His 
yVife, 1886; The Earth Trembled, 1887; Found, yet Lost, 1888; Miss Lou, 
1888; E. P. Roe: Reminiscences of His Life. By his sister, Mary A. Roe, 
1899. 

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett. (1849 .) That Lass o' Low- 

Tie's, 1877; Surly Tim, 1877; Haicorth's, 1879; Louisiana, 1880; A Fair 
Barbarian, 1881; Through One Administration, 1883; Little Lord Fauntle- 
roy, 1886; Editha's Burglar, 1888; Sara Crewe, 1888; The Pretty Sister 
of Jose, 1889; Little Saint Elizabeth, 1890; Giovanni and the Other, 1892; 
The One I Knew Best of All [aiitobiography], 1893; Two Little Pilgrims' 
Progress, 1895; A Lady of Quality, 1896; His Grace of Osmonde, 1897; 
In Connection icith the De-Willoughby Claim, 1899; The Making 
of a Marchioness, 1901; The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, 1902; 
In the Closed Room, 1904; A Little Princess: Being the Whole 
Story of Sara Crewe, 1905; Daicn of a To-morrow, 1906; Earlier 
Stories, first and second series, 1906; Queen Silver-Bell, 1906; Racketty- 
Packetty House, 1906; The Shuttle, 1907; Cozy Lion, 1907; Good Wolf, 
1908; Spring Cleaning; as Told by Queen Crosspatch, 1908; Land of the 
Blue Flower, 1909; Baby Crusoe and His Man Saturday, 1909; Secret 
Garden, 1911; My Robin, 1912; T. Tembaron, 1913. 

Feancis Marion Ckawfoed. (1854-1909.) Mr. Isaacs, 1882; Doctor 
Claudius, 1883; A Roman Singer, To Leeward, and An American Politi- 
cian, 1884; Zoroaster, 1885; A Tale of a Lonely Parish, 1886; Marzio'^ 
Crucifix, Paul Patoff, and Saracinesca, 1887; With the Immortals, 1888; 
Greifenstein and Sant' Ilario, 1889; The Cigarette-maker's Romance, 1890; 
Kahled and The Witch of Prague, 1891; The Three Fates, The Children 
of the King, and Don Orsino, 1892; Marion Darche, Pietro Ghisleri, and 
The Novel: What It Is, 1893; Katherine Lauderdale, Love in Idleness, The 
Ralstons, Casa Braccio, and Adam Johnstone's Son, 1894; Taquisara, and 
Corleone, 1896; Ave Roma Immortalis, 1898; Via Criicis, 1899; In the 
Palace of the King, Southern Italy and Sicily, and The Rulers of the 
South, 1900; Marietta, a Maid of Venice, 1901; Cecilia, A Story of Modern 
Rome, 1902; The Heart of Rome, and Man Overboard, 1903; Whosoever 
Shall Offend, 1904; Fair Margaret and Salve Venetia, 1905; A Lady of 
Rome, 1906; Arethusa and The Little City of Hope, 1907; The Primadonna 
and The Diva's Ruby, 1908; The White Sister, 1909. 

Margaretta Wade Deland. (1857 .) The Old Garden and Other 

Verses, 1886; John Ward, Preacher, 1888; Florida Days, 1889; Sidney, 
1890; Story of a Child, 1892; Mr. Tommy Dove, and Other Stories, 1893; 
Philip and His Wife, 1894; The Wisdom of Fools, 1897; Old Chester Tales, 
1898; Dr. Lavendar's People, 1903; The Common Way, 1904; The Atcaken- 
tng of Helena Ritchie, 1906; An Encore, 1907; R. J. Mother and Some Other 
People, 1908; Where the Laborers Are Few, 1909; The Way of Peace, 1910} 



412 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The Iron Woman, 1911; The Voice, 1912; Partners, 1913; The Hands of 
Esau, 1914. 

Stephen Ckane. (1871-1900.) The Black Riders and Other Lines, 
1895; The Red Badge of Courage: Episode of the American Civil War, 
1895; Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, 1896; Georges Mother, 1896; The 
Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, 1896; 
The Third Violet, 1897; The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure, 
1898; The Monster and Other Stories, 1899; Active Service: a Novel, 1899; 
War Is Kind, 1899; Whilomville Stories, 1900; Great Battles of the 
World, 1900; Wounds in the Rain: War Stories, 1900. 

Fkank Norris. (1870-1902.) Moran of "The Lady Letty," 1898; Blix, 
1899; McTeague: a Story of San Francisco, 1899; A Man's Woman, 1900; 
The Octopus: a Story of California, 1901; The Pit: a Story of Chicago, 
1902; A Deal in Wheat, and Other Stories, 1903; Complete Works. Golden 
Gate Edition. Seven Volumes, 1903; Responsibilities of the Novelist and 
Other Literary Essays, 1903; Vandover and the Brute. 

Harold Frederic. (1856-1898.) Seth's Brother's Wife: a Study of 
Life in the Greater New York, 1887; The Lawton Girl, 1890; In the Val- 
ley, 1891; Young Emperor William II. of Germany, 1891; The New Exo- 
dus: a Study of Israel in Russia, 1892; The Return of O'Mahony, 1892 -, 
The Copperhead, 1893; Marsena, and Other Stories of the War Time, 1394 -, 
Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia, 1896; The Damnation of 
Theron Ware, 1896; March Bares, 1896; The Deserter and Other Stories: 
a Book of Two Wars, 1898; Gloria Mundi, 1899; The Market-Place, 1899. 

Paul Leicester Ford. (1865-1902.) Who Was the Mother of Frank- 
lin's Son? 1889; The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought 
of Him, 1894; The True George Washington, 1896; The Great K. and A. 
Robbery, 1897; The Story of an Untold Love, 1897; Tattle Tales of Cupid, 
1898; Janice Meredith: a Story of the American Revolution, 1899; The 
Many-sided Franklin, 1899; Wanted: a Match-maker, 1900; A House 
Party, 1901; Wanted: a Chaperon, 1902; A Checked Love Affair; and the 
Cortelyou Feud, 1903; Love Finds a Way, 1904; Thomas Jefferson, 1904. 
His bibliographies and edited work not listed. 

Silas Weir Mitchell. (1829-1914.) Hephzibah Guiness, 1880; Thee 
and You, 1880; A Draft on the Bank of Spain, 1880; In War Time, 1882; 
The Hill of Stones and Other Poems, 1883; Roland Blake, 1886; Far in 
the Forest, 1889; The Cup of Youth and Other Poems, 1889; The Psalm of 
Death and Other Poems, 1890; Characteristics, 1892; Francis Blake: a 
Tragedy of the Sea, 1892; The Mother and Other Poems, 1892; Mr. Kris 
Kringle: a Christmas Tale, 1893; Philip Vernon: a Tale in> Prose and 
Verse, 1895; When All the Woods Are Green: a Novel, 1894; Madeira's 
Party, 1895; Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, 1897; Adventures of Francois, 
Foundling, Thief, Juggler, and Fencing Master, During the French Revn^ 
lution, 1898; Autobiography of a Quack, 1900; Dr. North and His Friends, 
1900; The Wager and Other Poems, 1900; Circumstance, 1901; A Comedy 
of Conscience, 1903; Little Stories, 1903: New Samaria and The Summer 
of St. Martin, 1904; The Youth of Washington, 1904; Constance Trescott, 
1905; A Diplomatic Adventure, 1905; The Red City: a Novel of the Second 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 413 

Administration of President Washington, 1907 ; John Sherwood, Ironmas- 
ter, 1910; The Guillotine Club and Other Stories, 1910; Westicays, 1913. 
His many medical works not listed. 

Charles Iving. (1844 .) The Colonel's Daughter; or. Winning His 

Spurs, 1883; Marion's Faith, 1886; The Deserter, 1887; Froin the Hanks, 
1887; A War-Time Wooing, 1888; Between the Lines, 1889; Sunset Pass, 
1889; Laramie; or, the Queen of Bedlam: a Story of the Sioux War of 
1S76, 1889; Starlight Ranch, and Other Stories of Army Life on the Fron- 
tier, 1890; The Colonel's Christmas Dinner, 1890; Campaigning with Crook 
and Stories of Army Life, 1890; Trials of a Staff Officer, 1891; Two Sol- 
diers, 1891; Dunraven Ranch, 1891; Captain Blake, 1891; Foes in Amhush, 
1893; A Soldier's Secret: a Story of the Sioux War of IS'JO, 1893; War- 
ing's Peril, 1894; Initial Experience and Other Stories, 1894; Cadet Days: 
a Story of West Point, 1894; Under Fire, 1895; Story of Fort Frayne, 
1895; Rancho del Muerlo, 1895; Captain Close, 1895; Sergeant Croesus, 
1895; An Army Wife, 1896; A Garrison Tangle, 1896; A Tame Surrender: 
a Story of the Chicago Strike, 1896; Trooper Ross, 1890; Trumpeter Fred: 
a Story of the Plains, 1896; Warrior Gap: a Story of the Sioux Outbreak 
of 186S, 1897; Raifs Recruit, 1898; The General's Double: a Story of the 
Army of the Potomac, 1898; A Wounded 'Name, 1898; Trooper Galahad, 
1899; From School to Battlefield, 1899; In Spite of Foes, 1901; From the 
Ranks, 1901; Norman Bolt: a Story of the Army of the Cumberland, 1901; 
Ray's Daughter: a Story of Manila, 1901 ; Conquering Corps Badge and 
Other Stories of the Philippines, 1902; The Iron Brigade, 1902; Way Out 
West, 1902; An Apache Princess, 1903; A Daughter of the Sioux, 1903; 
Comrades in Arms, 1904; A Knight of Columbia, 1904; A Medal of Honor, 
1905; Famous and Decisive Battles of the World, 1905; A Soldier's Trial: 
an Ejnsode of the Canteen Crusade, 1905; Farther Story of Lieutenant 
Sandy Ray, 1906; Tonio, Son of the Sierras, 1906; Captured: a Story of 
Sandy Bay, 1907; The Rock of Chicamauga, 1907; To the Front, 1908; 
Lanier of the Cavalry, 1909; The True Ulysses S. Grant, 1914. 

Maky Hallock Foote. (1847 .) The Led-Horse Claim: Romance 

of a Mining Camp, 1883; John Bodewin's Testimony, 1885; The Last As- 
sembly Ball, 1886; The Chosen Valley, 1892; Coeur d'Alene, 1894; In Exile 
and Other Stories, 1894; The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories, 1895; 
Little Fig-tree Stories, 1899; The Prodigal, 1900; The Desert and The 
Sown, 1902; A Touch of Sin and Other Stories, 1903; Royal Americans, 
1910; Picked Company: a Novel, 1912. 

Clara Louise Burniiam. (1854 .) No Gentleman, 1881; A Sane 

Lunatic, 1882; Dearly Bought, 1884; Next Door, 1886; Young Maids and 
Old, 1888; The Mistress of Beech Knoll, 1890; Miss Bragg's Secretary, 
1892; Dr. Latimer, 1893; Sweet Clover, 1894; The Wise Woman, 1895; 
Miss Archer Archer, 1897; A Great Love, 1898; A West Point Wooing, 
1899; Miss Prichord's Wedding Trip, 1901; The Right Princess, 1902; 
Jewel, 1903; Jewel's Story Book, 1904; The Opened Shutters, 1906; The 
Leaven of Love, 1908; Clever Betsey, 1910; The Inner Flame, 1912 

Jltlian Hawthorne. (1846 .) Bressant, 1873; Idolatry, 1874; 

Saxon Studies, 1875; Garth, 1877; Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds, 1878; 



414 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

ArcMhald Malmaison, 1879; Sebastian Strome, 1880; Fortune's Fool, 1883; 
Dust: a Novel, 1883; Beatrix Randolph, 1883; Prince Saroni's Wife, 1884; 
Noble Blood, 1884; Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: a Biography, 
1885; Love— or a Name, 1885; Sinfire, 1886; The Trial of Gideon, 1886; 
John Parmelee's Curse, 1886; Confessions and Criticisms, 1887; five novels 
from the Diary of Inspector Byrnes: The Tragic Mystery, The Great Bank 
Bobbery, An American Penman, Section 558, 1887, and Another's Crime, 
1888; The Professor's Sister: a Romance; A Miser of Second Avenue, 1888; 
A Dream and a Forgetting, 1888; David Poindexter's Disappearance, 
1888; Kildhurin's Oak, 1889; Constance, 1889; Pauline, 1890; A Stage 
Friend, 1890; American Literature: an Elementary Textbook [with 
Leonard Lemmon], 1891; Humors of the Fair, 1893; Six Cent Sam's, 
1893; The Golden Fleece: a Romance, 1896; A Fool of Nature, 
1896; Love Is a Spirit, 1896; A History of the United States, 1898; Haw- 
thorne and His Circle, 1903; The Secret of Solomon, 1909; Lovers in 
Heaven, 1910; The Subterranean Brotherhood, 1914. 

Blanche Willis Howard, Mrs. von Teuffel. (1847-1898.) One Sum- 
mer, 1877; One Year Abroad, 1877; Aunt Serena, 1881; Guenn: a Wave 
of the Breton Coast, 1884; The Open Door, 1891; A Fellowe and His Wife 
[with W. Sharp], 1892; A Battle and a Boy, 1892; No Heroes, 1893; 
Seven on the Highways, 1897; Dionysius, the Weaver's Heart's Dearest, 
1899 ; The Garden of Eden, 1900. 

Edwakd Bellamy. (1850-1898.) Six to One: a Nantucket Idyl, 1878; 
Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, 1880; Miss Luddington's Sister: a Romance of 
Immortality, 1884; Looking Backward, 20Q0-1S81, 1888; Equality, 1897; 
A Blindman's World, and Other Stories, 1898; The Duke of Stockbridge: 
a Romance of Shay's Rebellion, 1900. 

Hjalmab Hjoeth Boyesen. (1848-1895.) Gunnar, 1874; A Norse- 
man's Pilgrimage, 1875; Tales from Two Hemispheres, 1876; Falconberg, 
1879; Goethe and Schiller: Their Lives and Works, 1879; Queen Titania, 
1881 ; Ilka on the Hill-Top, 1881 ; Idyls of Norway and Other Poems, 
1882; A Daughter of the Philistines, 1883; The Story of Norway, 1886; 
The Modern Vikings, 1887; Vagabond Tales, 1889; The Light of Her Coun- 
tenance, 1889; The Mammon of Unrighteousness, 1891; Essays on German 
Literature, 1892; Boyhood in Norway, 1892; The Golden Calf: a Novel, 
1892; Social Strugglers, 1893; Commentary on the Writings of Henrik 
Ibsen, 1894; Literary and Social Silhouettes, 1894; Essays on Scandinavian 
Literature, 1895. 

Arthub Sherbitrne Hardy. (1847 .) Francesca of Rimini: a 

Poem, 1878; But Yet a Woman, 1883; The Wind of Destiny, 1886; Passe 
Rose, 1889; Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima, 1891; Songs of 
Two, 1900; His Daughter First, 1903; Aurelie, 1912; Diane and Her 
Friends, 1914. His mathematical works not listed. 

Robert Grant. (1852 .) The Little Tin Gods-on-Wheels; or. So- 
ciety in Our Modern Athens, 1879; The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl, 
1880; The Lambs: a Tragedy, 1882; An Average Man, 1884; Face to Face, 
1886; The Knave of Hearts: a Fairy Story, 1886; A Romantic Young 
Lady, 1886; Jack Hall, 1887; Jack in the Bush; or, a Summer on a Sal- 



SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION 415 

mon River, 1888; The Carletons, 1891; Mrs. Harold Stagg, 1891; The 
Rejections of a Married Man, 1892; The Opinions of a Philosopher, 1893; 
The Art of Living, 1895; A Bachelor's Christmas, 1895; The North Shore 
of Massachusetts, 1896; Search-Light Letters, 1899; Unleavened Bread, 
1900; The Undercurrent, 1904; The Orchid, 1905; Laoo-breakers and Other 
Stories, 1906; The Chippendales, 1909; Confessions of a Grandfather, 1912. 

Frederick Jesup Stimson, "J. S. of Dale." (1855 .) Rollo's 

Journey to Cambridge, 1879; Guerndale, an Old Story, 1882; The Crime 
of Henry Vane, 1884; The Sentimental Calendar, 1880; First Harvests, 
1888; Mrs. Knollys and Other Stories, 1894; Pirate Gold, ISOO; 7vtn<7 
Noanett: a Story of Old Virginia and Massachusetts Bay, 1896; Jethro 
Bacon of Sandwich, 1902; In Cure of Her Soul, 1906. His law publica- 
tions not listed. 

Henry Blake Fuller. (1857 .) The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, 

1891; The Chatelaine of La Trinite, 1892; The Cliff -Dicellers, 1893; With 
the Procession, 1895; The Puppet-Booth: Twelve Plays, 1896; From the 
Other Side: Sto7-ies of Transatlantic Travel, 1898; The Last Refuge: a 
Sicilian Romance, 1900; Under the Skylights, 1901; Waldo Trench and 
Others: Stories of Americans in Italy, 1908. 

Francis Hopkinsox Smith. (1838-1915.) Old Lines in New Black 
and White, 1885; Well-Worn Roads, 1880; A White Umbrella in Mexico, 
1889; A Book of the Tile Club, 1890; Col. Carter of Cartersville, 1891; 
A Day at Laguerre's, 1892; American Illustrators, 1892; A Gentleman 
Vagabond and Some Others, 1895; Tom Grogan, 1890; Gondola Days, 
1897; Venice of To-day, 1897; Caleb West, 1898; The Other Fellow, 1899; 
The Fortunes of Oliver Horn, 1902; The Under Dog, 1903; Col. Carter's 
Christmas, 1904; At Close Range, 1905; The Wood Fire in Number S, 
1905; The Tides of Barnegat, 1906; The Veiled Lady, 1907; The Romance 
of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman, 1907; Peter, 1908; Forty Minutes Late, 
1909; Kennedy Square, 1911; The Arm-Chair at the Inn, 1912; In Thack- 
eray's London, 1913; In Dickens's London, 1914. 



CHAPTER XVIII 



THE ESSAYISTS 



In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also 
voluminous. The greater part of our historical writings has 
been produced since 1870 and the same is true of our biography. 
Literary quality, however, has suffered. Emphasis has been 
placed upon material rather than upon graces of style; upon 
matter, but little upon manner. Never before have historian 
and biographer been so tireless in their search for sources: 
the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War is a veritable library 
of materials; the Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay contains 
one million five hundred thousand words. It is as long as Ban- 
croft's whole history of the United States, it is twice as long as 
Green's History of the English People, and it contains three 
hundred thousand words more than Gibbon's Decline and Fall 
of the Eoman Empire. It has been a development from the 
spirit of the era : the demand for actuality. Never before such 
eagerness to uncover new facts, to present documents, to be 
realistically true, but it has been at the expense of literary style. 
A few books, like General Grant's Memoirs and Captain Mahan's 
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, have had the power 
of simplicity, the impelling force that comes from conscious- 
ness only of the message to be delivered. But all too often the 
material has been presented in a colorless, journalistic form 
that bars it forever from consideration as literature in the 
higher sense of that term. The most of it, even the life of 
Lincoln, is to be placed in the same category as scientific writ- 
ings and all those other prose forms that are concerned only 
with the presenting of positive knowledge. Parkman seems to 
have been the last historian who was able to present his material 
with literary distinction. 

The essay has been voluminous all through the period, but 
it too has changed its tone. More than any other literary form 
it has been the medium through which we may trace the transi- 

416 



THE ESSAYISTS 417 

tion from the old period to the new. American literature had 
begun with the essay, and we have seen how the form, desig- 
nated by the name of sketch, grew in the hands of Irving and 
Hawthorne and Poe into what in the period of the seventies 
became recognized as a distinct literary form with the name 
of short story. 

The literary essay is a classical form : to flourish, it needs the 
atmosphere of old culture and established social traditions; it 
must work in the materials of classic literature; it is leisurely 
in method, discursive, gently sentimental. It was the dominat- 
ing form, it will be remembered, in the classical age of Addison, 
the age of manners and mind. It was peculiarly fitted, too, 
to be the literary vehicle of the later classical age in America, 
the Europe-centered period of Irving and Emerson and Willis 
and Holmes. The early pilgrims to the holy land of the Old 
World sent back their impressions and dreamings in the form 
of essays: Longfellow's Outre-Mer, for example, and Willis's 
Pencillings hy the Way. On the same shelf with The Sketch 
Book belong Willis's Letters from Under a Bridge, Dana's The 
Idle Man, Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, Curtis 's 
Prue and I, and a great mass of similar work, enough indeed to 
give color and even name to its period. This shelf more than 
any other marks the extent of England's dominion over the 
literature of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century: 
it was the most distinctive product of our classical age. Until 
America has a rich background of her own with old culture and 
traditions, with venerable native classics from which to quote, 
and a long vista of romantic history down which to look, her 
contemplative and strictly literary essays must necessarily be 
redolent of the atmosphere of other lands. 



The National Period, with its new breath of all-Americanism, 
its new romantic spirit, its youthful exuberance, and its self- 
realization, has been, therefore, not a period in which the essay 
of the old type could find congenial soil. Instead of the Irving 
sketch there has been the vivid, sharply cut short story ; instead 
of the contemplative, dreamy study of personalities and in- 
stitutions — Irving 's "The Broken Heart," Longfellow's "Pere 
la Chaise" — there have been incisive, analytical, clearly cut 



f^""' 

k. 



418 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

special studies, like Woodrow Wilson's Mere Literature and 
Other Essays; instead of the delightful, discursive personal tat- 
tle of a Charles Lamb and a Dr. Holmes there has been the 
colorless editorial essay, all force and facts, or the undistinctive, 
business-like special article, prosiest of all prose. 

The transition figure in the history of the American essay 
was Charles Dudley Warner, the last of the contemplative 
Sketch Book essayists, and, with Higginson, Burroughs, Maurice 
Thompson, and others, a leading influence in the bringing in of 
the new freshness and naturalness and journalistic abandon 
that gave character to the prose of the later period. He was a 
New Englander, one of that small belated group born in the 
twenties — Mitchell, Hale, Higginson, Norton, for example — 
that found itself in a Janus-like position between the old school 
of Emerson and Longfellow and the new school of non-New Eng- 
landers — Harte, Hay, Howells, Mark Twain. Warner was pe- 
culiarly a transition figure. He could collaborate with Mark 
Twain on that most distinctively latter-day novel The Gilded 
Age, and be classed by his generation with the humorists of 
the Burdette, Josh Billings group, yet at the death of George 
William Curtis he could be chosen as without question the only 
logical heir to the Editor's Easy Chair department of Harper's 
Magazine. 

Warner was born in 1829, the birth year of Dr. S. Weir 
Mitchell, and his birthplace was a farm in western Massachu- 
setts, where his ancestors for generations had been sturdy Puri- 
tan yeomen. The atmosphere of this home and the round of its 
life he has described with autobiographic pen in Being a Boy, 
the most valuable of all his studies. Concerning the rest of his 
life one needs only to record that he was graduated from Hamil- 
ton College in 1851 and from the law department of the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania in 1857, and that after four years of 
legal practice in Chicago he was invited by his classmate, Sena- 
tor J. R. Hawley, to remove to Hartford, Connecticut, to become 
associate editor of the paper that was soon merged with the 
Hartford C our ant. To this paper either as its editor or as a 
contributor he gave the best years of his life. He used his 
vacations for foreign travel, at one time spending a year and 
a half abroad, and in his later years he saw much of his own 
land, but always he traveled pen in hand, ready to embody every 



THE ESSAYISTS 419 

observation and sentiment in a letter for the readers at home. 
Travel letters of the older type they were, such as Taylor wrote 
home from Germany and Curtis sent from the Nile and the 
Levant, gently sentimental, humorous in a pervasive way, per- 
fectly natural, unconscious of stjde. 

Warner was forty and a confirmed journalist before he pub- 
lished anything in book form, and even this first volume was not 
written with book intent. He had contributed a rambling series 
of papers to the Courant, a sort of humorous echo of Greeley's 
What I Know about Farming, careless, newspapery, funny in 
a chuckling sort of way, and perfectly unconventional and free 
from effort. Naturalness was its main charm. The period was 
ready for out-of-doors themes simply presented, and it found 
an enthusiastic circle of readers who demanded its publication 
in book form. Henry Ward Beecher was among them and as 
an inducement he promised an introductory letter. The result 
was My Summer in a Garden, 1870, a book that sprang into 
wide popularity and that undoubtedly was one of the forma- 
tive influences of the new period. He followed it with Backlog 
Studies, a series of sketches of the Donald G. Mitchell variety, 
and then with various travel books like Saunterings and My 
Winter on the Nile. Late in life he published novels, A Little 
Journey in the World, The Golden House, and others dealing 
with phases of life in New York City, and he served as editor 
of several important series of books, notably The American 
Men of Letters Series of biographies, to which he himself con- 
tributed the life of Irving. » 

Time enough has elapsed to enable us to consider the work 
of Warner apart from the charm of his personal presence, 
and it is seen now that his generation overestimated his work. 
He was in no sense an inspired soul ; he had little to offer that 
was really new. He wrote like the practical editor of a daily 
paper, fluently, copiously, unhesitatingly. The style is that of 
the practised worker who dictates to his stenographer. There 
is lack of incisiveness, sharpness of outline, cohesion of thought. 
He lacks revision, flashes of insight, creative moments when 
the pen is forgotten. He wrote on many topics, but there are 
no passages that one is compelled to (luote. He was a classicist 
who wrote with perfect coolness, just as others had written be- 
fore him. His gentle spirit, his sentiment, his Puritan con- 



120 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

science, and a certain serenity of view that whispered of high 
character and perfect breeding, endeared him to his first readers. 
But his style of humor belonged only to his own generation — 
it was not embodied at all in a humorous character; and his 
ethical teachings seem trite now and conventional. His in- 
fluence at a critical period of American literature entitles him 
to serious consideration, but he won for himself no permanent 
place. He will live longest, perhaps, in a few of his shorter 
pieces: Being a Boy, "How Spring Came in New England," 
"A-Hunting the Deer," and "Old Mountain Phelps." 

There are those who would rate his novels above his essays, 
those indeed who would rate them even with the work of 
Howells. Not many, however. That his fiction has about it a 
certain power can not be denied. Its author had the journalistic 
sense of the value of contemporary events, as well as the journal- 
istic faculty for gathering interesting facts. He had, too, what 
so many novelists lack, the power to trace by almost imperceptible 
processes the gradual growth of a character. A Little Journey 
in the World, for instance, is a study of degeneration, skilfully 
done. A woman who has been reared among humble yet en- 
nobling surroundings removes to New York and marries a very 
rich man and we are shown how little by little all that is really 
fine at the heart of her life is eaten away though the surface 
remains as beautiful as ever. There is a naturalness about it 
that is charming, and there is evident everywhere an honesty 
of purpose and a depth of experience that are unusual, but one 
may not say more. The novels came from the critical impulse 
rather than from the creative. They are humanitarian docu- 
ments rather than creations breathing the breath of life. They 
do not move us. To realize where they fail one has but to com- 
pare his chapters in The Gilded Age with Mark Twain's. It 
is like looking from a still-life picture on a parlor wall out upon 
an actual steamboat pulling showily up to a Mississippi wharf. 

II 

The opposite of Warner in every respect was Lafcadio Hearn, 
a figure more picturesque even than Joaquin Miller and more 
puzzling than Whitman. Instead of serene classicism, genius; 
instead of Puritan inflexibility and reverence for the respectable, 
tumultuous wandei'ings — a nan without a country, without a 



THE ESSAYISTS 421 

religion, without anything fixed save a restless love of" the beauti- 
ful — emotional, a bundle of nerves, moody, sudden, the gor- 
geous Gallic at eternal odds with the florid, beauty-loving 
Hellenic; a man forever homeless, yet forever pathetic with a 
nostalgia that finally broke his heart. His personality was a 
strangely elusive one, and his biography, especially in its earlier 
years, is as full of romantic conjecture as De Quincey's early 
life or Byron's. His very name was romantic. His father, 
member of an ancient Irish family, had accompanied his regi- 
ment as surgeon-major into the East, and while stationed at 
Corfu had become infatuated with a beautiful Grecian girl, 
Rosa Cerigote, and had married her. Laf cadio they named their 
son from the island where he was born, his mother's home, 
Leucadia, in modern Greek Lefcadia, the Ionian island of 
Sappho. Here he spent his babyhood, how much of it we do 
not know. Of his father, he has said nothing, and of his mother, 
only this hint in a later bit of impressionism — elusive, sugges- 
tive, characteristic: 

I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and 
the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this 
life or of some life before, I can not tell, but I know the sky was vei-y 
much more blue, and nearer to the world — almost as it seems to be- 
come above the masts of a steamer steaming into the equatorial sum- 
mer. . . . Each day there were new wonders and new pleasures for 
me, and all that country and time were softly ruled by one who 
thought only of ways to make me happy. . . . When day was done 
and l;here fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would 
tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. 
I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the 
pleasure became too great, she would sing- a weird little song which 
always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day ; and she wept 
and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, 
because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I 
never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew I had 
lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old. 

Was it the ^gean island of his birth or was it the West Indian 
island to which his father later was ordered with his regiment? 
We do not know. We know, however, that the mother lived for 
a time in Ireland, that another son was born, and then when 
the elder boy was seven she went away to Smj^rna never to 
return. The rest is conjecture, save for the significant fact 
that both parents soon afterward married again. 



i22 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

The boy, unwelcome, forlorn, out of sympathy with bis sur- 
roundings, was sent to live with his aunt in Ireland, then later 
was put to school in Prance in preparation for the priesthood. 
Two years in France, formative years in which he learned among 
a myriad of other things the fluent use of French, then in 1865 
we find him in the Roman Catholic college at Durham, England, 
where came to him the first great tragedy of his life: an acci- 
dent at play that left him blinded in one eye and partly 
blinded in the other. Soon afterwards came the break with his 
aunt — father and mother had passed out of his life — he refused 
to become a priest, refused to live longer in any paths save his 
own, and for the rest of his life he was a wanderer. 

There is much in his life and temperament to suggest De 
Quincey. Hearn, too, for a vague period — two or three years it 
may have been — wandered in the lower strata of London, half 
dead with hunger and sickness, aflame with imagination, rest- 
less, ambitious. At nineteen we find him in New York, read- 
ing in the public library, eagerly, omnivorously, despite his 
feeble vision, then suddenly, how we do not know, he is in Cin- 
cinnati, Ohio, where he makes the whole city gasp with horror 
at the story he writes of a murder in one of their narrow streets, 
and secures a position on the Enquirer. In 1877 he has wan- 
dered as far south as New Orleans, where for the first time in his 
life he finds congenial atmosphere and where he supports him- 
self by reporting for the Times-Democrat. 

Now it was that his French schooling had its effect. The 
Creole patois delighted him; he compiled a book of Creole 
proverbs, Gomho Zhehes he fantastically called it; and he fed 
his imagination with the old French past of the city, wandering 
as Cable had done among its ancient buildings, and, like Cable 
again, devouring its romantic old chronicles. French novels he 
read interminably, eagerly, especially the romantics — Hugo, 
Gautier, Baudelaire. How richly he read them we learn from 
his letters, most of all from those written in his later life to 
Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and preserved in Elizabeth 
Bisland's third volume. Few have read more discerningly or 
have voiced their findings more brilliantly. This of Loti: 

There is not much heart in Loti, but there is a fine brain. — To 
me Loti seems for a space to have looked into Nature's whole splendid 
burning fulgurant soul, and to have written under her very deepest. 



THE ESSAYISTS 423 

and strongest inspiration. He was young. Then the color and the 
light faded, and onlj' the v/orn-out blase nerves remained; and the poet 
became — a little morbid modern affected Frenchman. 

Strange self-revealment. It was of himself he was speaking, 
had he but realized it. He too began with power under the 
deepest and strongest inspiration; he too had caught a vision, 
splendid, burning, fulgurant. If there was an undoubted genius 
in our national period it was Hearn. He poured his eager 
dreamings at first into the New Orleans papers: ' ' Fantasties, " 
they have been called, by the editor who of late has hunted them 
from their forgotten columns. Then came Chita, written after 
a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico and published first 
in the Times-Democrat with the title Tom Letters, and then in 
Harper's Magazine, April, 1888. 

Here for the first time we get the measure of the man, his 
Celtic imagination, fervor and intensity, his Greek passion for 
beauty. It is not English at all: it is the dream of a Celtic 
Greek, who has saturated himself with the French romantics 
and the color and the profusion of the tropic gulf lands. It 
is not, as the magazine termed it, a novelette; it is a loosely 
gathered bundle of fictional sketches, lurid patches, *'torn let- 
ters," indeed, written with torrential power and blazing with 
color. Everywhere landscapes intense, drawn with fewest 
strokes, impressions, suggestions. He would make you feel the 
desolate shore on the gulf side of the island, but he selects only 
a single detail: 

The trees — where there are any trees — all bend away from the sea; 
and even of bright hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something 
grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks 
at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping sil- 
houettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming 
garments and wind-blown hair — bowing grievously and thrusting out 
arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And 
they are being pursued indeed — for the sea is devouring the land. 
Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging 
of Ocean's cavah-y. 

Always is he a colorist, and always does he use his eolora 
daintily, effectively, distinctively— one feels rather than sees; 

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is some- 
thing impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in th^ 



i24 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

paler zones, do earth and heaven take such huuinosity: those will best 
understand me who have seen the si^lendor of a West Indian sky. 
And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color in these Gulf- 
days which is not of the Antilles — a spirituality, as of eternal tropica^ 
spring. 

It describes his own style ; one need say no more. 

When he would describe action there is in him a Byronic 
power that lays hold on one and chokes and stifles. Who out- 
side of Don Juan has made us feel so fearfully a tropic hurricane ? 

Then arose a frightful cry — the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry 
of hopeless fear — the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly 
brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without 
consolation, without possibility of respite. Sauve qui pent! Some 
wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet tables, to 
the sofas, to the billiard tables — during one terrible instant — against 
fruitless heroisms, against futile generosities — raged all the frenzy of 
selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then — then came, thun- 
dering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom! — One 
crash ! — the huge frame building rocks like a cradle, seesaws, crackles. 
What are human shrieks now"? — the tornado is shrieking! Another! — 
chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out; a sweeping cataract hurls 
in : the immense hall rises — oscillates — twirls as upon a pivot — crepi- 
tates — crumbles into ruin. Crash again! — the swirling wreck dissolves 
into the wallowing of another monster billow; and a hundred cottages 
overturn, spin on sudden eddies, quiver, disjoint, and melt into the 
seething. 

So the Hurricane passed, 

Chita, like all the rest of Hearn's work, is a thing of frag- 
ments. It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes 
with the sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid 
siestas, it is raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. 
It is incoherent, rhapsodic, half picture, half suggestion — ma- 
terials rather than final structure. The style is wholly Gallic, 
like Cable's early style — sudden breaks — dashes — sentences 
stripped to the bare nouns and adjectives, swift shiftings of 
scenes, interjected exclamations, prayers: 

Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken 
all mythology dumb — thou most wrinkled living Sea, etc. 

Then swiftly following: 

Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven; — midsummer in the pest-smitten 
city of New Orleans. 



THE ESSAYISTS 425 

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached 
from the furnaee-cirele of the horizon ; — the lukewarm river yellow 
and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. The nights began with a black 
heat; — there were hours when the acrid air seemed to ferment for 
stagnation, and to bum the bronchial tubing; — then, toward morning 
it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews — till the 
sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with 
oven-heat. And the interminable procession of mourners and hearses 
and carriages again began to circulate between the centers of life and 
death ; — and long trains of steamships rushed from the port with heavy 
burden of fugitives. 

Then terror that lays cold hands on the heart : Julian dying of fever. 

From New Orleans he went in 1887 to the Windward Islands 
for new sensation, new color, new barbaric areas of human life. 
Two Years in the French West Indies is the literary result of 
it, a chaotic book, flashlights, impressions, but no single com- 
pleted impression, no totality, but the soul of the West Indies 
none the less, revealed with a rare, queer art that was individual. 
But no place, not even those Circe islands which he paints as 
the dream and the ultimate of human desire, could detain him 
long. Fickleness was in his blood, wandering was his birthright. 
Again he is in New York, and then with a commission from the 
Harpers he sails to Japan, where, in the rush and tumult of new 
sensation, he forgets his commission and loses himself completely 
in the new delicious world of impression. 

For Hearn was as unpractical as Shelley and he was without 
Shelley's ideals and altruistic dreams. He lived in a vague 
world of vision, of sensation, of intangible beauty. He could 
say of himself: 

Always haxang lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical 
matters that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. 
Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a 
watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man ought to do under any 
possible circumstances. I know nothing but sensation and books. 

Though he was now forty, he entered this new world as one new 
born into it. He adopted its costume, he slept with his head 
on a wooden pillow, he acquired citizenship, he married a Japa- 
nese wife and established a Japanese home, and he even went 
over completely to the Buddhist religion. 

The book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894, marks the be- 
ginning of his second literary period. Henceforth his writings 



426 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

center about Japan. He wrote no treatise, no serious study of 
actual conditions ; he wrote impressions, fragmentary suggestions 
of the Japan that was passing away, the romantic Japan of the 
ideal old regime, survivals of which he found everywhere. 
Japanese art and Japanese romance found in him a curious 
affinity. They mellowed and soothed the tumultuous spirit of 
his first art period. His impressionism became more subtly sug- 
gestive, more magically vague, more daintily colored. There 
had always been within him a strong element of mysticism, 
legacy of his Irish ancestry, and the subtly mystical side of 
Buddhism appealed to it strongly. He was able to interpret it 
for occidental comprehension, and he was able to make more 
comprehensible the subtle connotation of Japanese art, and to 
catch the subtler inner consciousness of Japan as no other of the 
Western world has ever caught it. In his first enthusiasm he 
wrote : 

This is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every 
one has an inner life of his own — which no other life can see, and the 
great secrets of which are never revealed, though occasionally when 
we create something beautiful we betray a faint glimpse of it. 

But the newness of this new world he had entered wore away 
at length. He was a creature of enthusiastic moments and he 
needed swift changes of sensation. He had reveled in the old, 
ideal Japan, but he found himself unable to live in it. A new 
regime had begun. He was filled with contempt at what he 
called "the frank selfishness, the apathetic vanity, the shallow, 
vulgar skepticism of the new Japan that prates its contempt 
about Tempo times, and ridicules the dear old men of the 
premeiji era." His last years were bitter with financial embar- 
rassment, and full of feverish literary creation for the sake of 
his growing family. The glow and fervor and genius of his 
first period faded more and more from his work; — he himself 
faded out. He felt the gulf that he had erected between himself 
and his race. To his sister he wrote: ''I feel myself in exile; 
and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for 
English life." He died of his own vehemence, worn out by 
oversensation, unnerved by restlessness and nostalgia and long- 
ing for he knew not what. 

The likeness of Hearn to De Quincey is almost complete. He 



THE ESSAYISTS 427 

had De Qiiincey's irresoluteness, his jangling nerves, his domi- 
nating fancy, his discursiveness, his gorgeous imagination, his 
oriental soul hampered with the fetters of occidental science. 
He too was essentially fragmentary in his literary output, a man 
of intense moods intensely painted, a man of books but of no 
single, unified, compelling book. One may not read essays like 
"Gothic Horror" or "The Nightmare Touch," or a passage 
like this from "Vespertina Cognitio," and not think of the great 
English opium-eater: 

It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague 
uneasiness — the suspicion — that precedes a nightmare. I was half- 
conscious, dream-conseious of the actual — knew myself in that very 
room — wanted to get up. Immediately the uneasiness grew into terror, 
because I found that I could not move. Something unutterable in the 
air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort re- 
sulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously 
I became aware of a Step ascending the stair — a muffled heaviness; and 
the real nightmare began — the horror of the ghastly magnetism that 
held voice and limb — the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and 
impotence. The stealthy Step approached — but with lentor malevo- 
lently measured — slowly, slowly, as if the stairs were miles deep. It 
gained the threshold — waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the 
locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came — a 
thing robed — feminine — reaching to the roof, not to be looked at ! A 
floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed ; — and then — with a frantic 
effort — I woke, bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going 
to burst. The shrine-light had died : in the blackness I could see noth- 
ing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard 
the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually 
unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but 
I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new 
wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard meanings — long- 
nightmare meanings — moanings that seemed to be answering each other 
from two ditferent rooms below. And then close to me my guide began 
to moan — hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him: — 

"Louis ! — Louis !" 

We both sat up at once. 

Like De Quincey, he lingers over the flavor of words, gathering 
them everywhere he may and gloating over them, tasting them 
with half-closed eyes like an epicure, and using them ever deli- 
cately, suggestively, inevitably. 

For me words have color, form, character: they have faces, ports, 
manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humors, eccentricities; — 
they have tints, tones, personalities. . . . Surely I have never yet made. 



428 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write 
ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see color 
in words, can smell the perfume of syllables in blossom, can be shocked 
with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of 
things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people. 

His essays, therefore, even as he has intimated, are for the 
few who are attuned to them, who have sense for delicate sug- 
gestion, for "the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of 
words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness, the hardness, 
the dryness or juiciness of words." Aside from his vision of 
beauty, his intensity, his suggestiveness of style, he has brought 
not much. The romancers of the period, a few of them, like 
Grace King, for example, have felt his influence, but it has not 
been a large one. He stands almost an isolated figure in his 
period, an intensely individual soul, a solitary genius like Poe. 
His place is a secure one. His circle of readers will never be 
large, but it will always be constant. 

Ill 

Another phase of French influence one finds in the work of 
Agnes Repplier, perhaps the leading writer of "the light essay" 
— the term is her own — in the later years of the period. Born 
of French parentage in Philadelphia, educated at a convent 
where prevailed French language and ideals, she was Gallic both 
by temperament and training. She was not influenced as Cable 
undoubtedly was influenced and Hearn: there is small trace in 
her essays of French style echoed consciously or unconsciously. 
The influence was deeper, it was temperamental and racial, mani- 
festing itself spontaneously in the display of those literary 
qualities that we associate with the word "French." Her 
favorite reading was largely in the English. She read enor- 
mously and she read note-book in hand. She added, moreover, 
culture and impressions by much residence abroad, and when she 
began to write it was with rich store of material. She began 
deliberately and she worked like a true classicist, leisurely, with 
no genius, and no message to urge her on. Her delight it was 
to talk about her reading, to add entertaining episodes, to em- 
broider with witty observation and pithy quotation or epigram. 
Save for the autobiographical study "In Our Convent Days," 
her writings mostly deal with the world of books. 



THE ESSAYISTS 429 

Miss Eepplier first came into notice in 1886 when one of her 
essays came to Aldrich, who was delighted with it and who made 
haste to introduce her to the Atlantic circle. Two years later 
came her first book, Books and Men, and since that time her 
essays, goodly in number and scattered through many maga- 
zines, have become a well-known feature of the times. Themes 
she takes to suit her fancy, apparently at random, though more 
often phases of her beloved "happy half century": *'A Short 
Defense of Villains," "Benefits of Superstition," "The Death- 
less Diary," "The Accursed Annual," "Marriage in Fiction," 
and all other topics pertinent to Dr. Johnson's little world. She 
adds not much to our knowledge, and she comes not often to 
any new conclusions, but she is so companionable, so sparkling 
and witty, that we can but read on with delight to the end. "We 
are in an atmosphere somehow of old culture and patrician 
grace, of courtliness and charm : 

Thou mindest me of gentle folks — 

Old gentlefolks are they — 
Thou sayst an undisputed thing 

In such a solemn way. 

A little of feminine contrariness there may be, perhaps, at 
times. A thing has been generally disparaged: she will defend 
it. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison may be mentioned: 
"I think, myself, that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly han- 
dled," she will retort. "He is not half such a prig as Daniel 
Deronda ; but he develops his priggishness with such ample de- 
tail through so many leisurely volumes." And her protest 
becomes almost acrimonious if anything of the new be flippantly 
boasted of as superior to the old: 

"We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indig- 
nant at anything the English say of us," writes Mr. Charles Dudley 
Warner. "We have recovered our balance. We know that since Gul- 
liver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England 
equal to Knickerbocker's New York; that not in this century has any 
English writer equaled the wit and satire of the Biglow Papers." 

Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving to be 
the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle satire of the 
American alongside of those trenchant and masterly pages which con- 
stitute the landmarks of literature? "Swift," says Dr. Johnson, with 
reluctant truthfulness, "must be allowed for a time to have dictated the 



430 AMEKICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

political opinions of the English nation." He is a writer whom we 
may be permitted to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as 
Mars, still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial luster of 
Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope 
to "recover our balance" by confounding values, a process of self- 
deception which misleads no one but ourselves. 

Realism, the new smartness of Western veritism, the cry that 
romance is dead, and that Walter Scott is outworn, found in her 
no sympathy. Her heart was in the eighteenth century rather 
than in what she has called "this overestimated century of prog^ 
ress." And so thoroughly convinced is she, it is impossible not 
to agree with her : 

Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mor- 
talitii, answered indignantly: "Opinion'? We did not one of us go to 
bed last night ! Nothing slept but my gout." Yet Rokebij and Childe 
Harold are both in sad disgrace with modern critics and Old Mortality 
stands gathering dust on our book-shelves. . . , We read The Bos- 
tonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their 
minute perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual 
hour, and are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. 
Could Daisy Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us awake 
till morning? 

A paragraph like this may be said to contain all the various 
elements of her style : 

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than 
the monotonous rei^etition of a phrase which catches and holds the 
public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a phrase 
— employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into 
the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature — is the "new 
woman." It has furnished inexhaustible jests to Life and Punch, and 
it has been received with all seriousness by those who read the present 
with no light from the i^ast, and so fail to perceive that all femininity 
is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type began when Eve 
arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims of her prede- 
cessor. "If the fifteenth century discovered America," says a vehement 
advocate of female progress, "it was reserved for the nineteenth cen- 
tury to discover woman"; and this remarkable statement has been 
gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten all 
about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint 
Theresa and Jeanne d'Are, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of Eng- 
land, who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the 
fortunes of the world. 

Here is the note of dissent from the widely accepted ; the appeal 



THE ESSAYISTS 431 

to antiquity ; the pithy quotation ; the allusion that takes for 
granted a cultivated reader ; the sprightly tripping of sentences ; 
the witty turn; and the atmosphere of feminine vivacity and 
brilliance. Apt quotations sparkle from every paragraph. 
Often she opens breezily with a quotation; she illustrates at 
every point with epigrams and witty sayings from all known 
and unknown sources; and she ends smartly by snapping the 
whip of a quotation in the final sentence or paragraph. 

The bent of her work, taking it all in all, is critical, and often 
in her criticism, especially her criticism of literature, she rises 
to the point of distinction. One may quote paragraphs here 
and there that are as illuminating as anything in American 
criticism. She is quick to see fallacies and to press an absurd 
deduction to its ridiculous end. She illumines a w^hole subject 
with a paragraph. This for example on Hamlin Garland: 

Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called — I think 
unfairly — Main-Traveled Roads have deprived most of us of some 
cheerful hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life in which ennui 
sits enthroned. It is not the poverty of his Western farmers that 
oppresses us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser evils with its 
deadly breath, is not known to these people at all. They have roofs, 
fire, food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless labor, the rough fare, 
the gTay skies, the muddy barn-yards, which stand for the trouble in 
their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of living. It is the burden 
of a dull existence, clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholy 
of which they have sufficient intelligence to understand. Theirs is the 
ennui of emptiness, and the implied reproach on every page is that 
a portion, and only a portion, of mankind is doomed to walk along 
these shaded paths; while happier mortals who abide in New York, or 
perhaps in Paris, spend their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual 
and artistic excitation. 

And few have put their criticism into more attractive form. It 
is penetrating and true and in addition it has a sparkle and wit 
about it that makes it anything but dry reading. Who has 
written more sympathetically, more understandingly, more de- 
lightfully about Charles Lamb than she if one takes her work 
all together. Here is a glimpse, yet how illuminating: 

Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, 
more than any other man of letters, belongs exclusively to his own 
land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was 
to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place 
where he ate frogs — "the nicest little delicate things — rabbity-flavoredc 



432 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was little or nothingj and 
America was less. The child of London streets, 

"Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear," 

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of 
the teeming city and the ripe old books. Lamb speaks to English hearts 
in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he 
recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an 
inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which 
England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save 
the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without a 
peer. 

But critic in the sense that Paul Elmer More is a critic, she 
certainly is not. She is temperamental rather than scientific. 
She makes brilliant observations, but she has no system, no 
patient analytical processes. She is, like Henry James, a critic 
by flashes, but those flashes often illuminate the whole landscape. 

She is a suggestive vs^riter, a writer who makes her reader 
think, who restores him as the dynamo restores the battery. 
Her world is a small one and it is not necessarily American, but 
it is intensely alive. In her own * ' happy half century, ' ' quoting 
Dr. Johnson, discoursing of Fanny Burney or Hannah More, 
or when telling of her cat or of the mystic lore of cats quoting 
Montaigne and Loti, or of those still more feminine topics: 
mirrors, spinsters, letters, the eternal feminine, she induces 
"electrical tingles of hit after hit." Her work must be classed 
with that of Lamb, of Loti, of Hearn, as work peculiarly per- 
sonal, work that makes its appeal largely on account of the 
surcharged individuality behind it. 

With Miss Repplier's essays may be classed those of Samuel 

McChord Crothers (1857 ), Edward S. Martin (1856 ) 

and Louise Imogen Guiney, who wrote for cultured people on 
topics for the most part drawn from the world of books. The 
work of Dr. Crothers is the most distinctive of the three. His 
wisdom, his delicate humor, his unfailing sense of values have 
made his papers, the most of them published in the Atlantic, a 
source of real delight and profit to an increasing circle. His 
books, like those of Miss Repplier, may be safely placed in the 
trunk when one starts on his summer's vacation and can take 
but few. They are wise, still books that one may live with. 



THE ESSAYISTS 433 



IV 



The period has abounded in critics from the first. The best 
of Lowell's prose came in the years following the war, and all 
of Stedman's was written after 1870. The great multiplication 
of newspapers and the increasing number of magazines led more 
and more to the production of book reviews. The North Ameri- 
can Review no longer said the last word about a book or an 
author. In 1865 Edwin L. Godkin (1831-1902) founded the 
New York Nation and contributed to it some of the most fearless 
and discriminating work of the period; in 1880 Francis F. 
Browne (1843-1913) founded the Chicago Dial and made its 
reviews among the best in America ; and in 1881 Jeannette L. 

Gilder (1849-1916) and her brother, Joseph B. Gilder (1858 ), 

established the New York Critic, a journal that for two decades 
exerted a formative influence upon the period. 

A few of the great numbers of book reviewers have done 
■^vorthy work, some of them even distinctive work, though most 
of it lies buried now in the great ephemeral mass. Howells and 
Aldrich, Horace E. Scudder (1838-1902) and Bliss Perry 

(I860 ) in the Atlantic, Henry M. Alden (1836 ) in 

Harper's, Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) in the Independent, 
and Hamilton W. Mabie (1846-1916) in the Outlook, all did work 
that undoubtedly helped to shape the period, but not much of 
it may rank as permanent literature. It has been too often 
journalistic: hastily prepared, a thing of the day's work. 

Much fine criticism has come sporadically from pens conse- 
crated to other literary tasks. Nearly all of the major poets of 
the period as well as the novelists and essayists have at one 
time or another made excursions into the field, sometimes pro- 
ducing only a brilliant bit of temperamental impressionism, 
sometimes working out studies that are systematic and complete. 
James, Howells, "Whitman, Burroughs, Lanier, Crawford, Tor^ 
rey, John Fiske, Maurice F. Egan, Henry Van Dyke, George E. 
Woodberry, James Brander Matthews have all added brilliant 
chapters to the sum of American criticism, but none may be 
called a critic in the sense Sainte-Beuve was a critic. Their 
work has been avocational, fitful excursions rather than sys- 
tematic exploration. 

During the later years of the period there has been but one 
who may be called a critic in the broader sense of the term— 



434 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

scholarly, leisurely of method, systematic, detached, literary in 
style and finish — a critic and only a critic, Paul Elmer More, 
whose Shelburne Essays are our nearest approach to those 
Causeries du Lundi of an earlier age. His birth and education 
in the West, in St. Louis, was an advantage at the start : it took 
from his later criticism that New England-centered point of 
view that is so evident in the work of critics like Richardson 
and Barrett Wendell. The New England culture he got in 
due time at Harvard, where he took two advanced degrees, and 
he broadened his outlook still further by pursuing his studies in 
European universities, returning at length to teach Sanscrit 
at Harvard and later at Bryn Mawr. Oriental language was 
his specialty. One catches the spirit of his earlier period by 
examining his first publications, among them A Century of 
Indian Epigram, "Translations or paraphrases in English verse 
of a hundred epigrams and precepts ascribed to a Hindu sage." 
This early enthusiasm for things oriental gave him a singularly 
valiTflble equipment for criticism. It broadened his view: it 
put into his hands the two opposite poles of human thought. 
His essay on Lafcadio Hearn is illuminating, not only of Hearn 
but of More himself. We can illustrate only lamely with frag- 
ments : 

Into the study of these by-ways of Oriental literature he has carried 
a third element, the dominant idea of Occidental science; and this ele- 
ment he has blended with Hindu religion and Japanese sesthetieism in 
a combination as bewildering as it is voluptuous. In this triple union 
lies his real claim to high originality. . . . 

Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr. Hearn's art, receives 
a new content from this union of the East and the West. . . . 

Is it not proper to say, after reading such passages as these, that 
Mr. Hearn has mtroduced a new element of psychology into literature? 
We are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly cry out that the 
past is dead. In one remarkable study of the emotions awakened by 
the baying of a gaunt white hound, Mr. Hearn shows how even the 
very beasts whom we despise as unreasoning and unremembering are 
filled with an articulate sense of this dark backward and abysm of 
time, whose shadow falls on their sensitive souls with the chill of a 
vague dread — dread, I say, for it must begin to be evident that this 
new psychology is fraught with meanings that may well trouble and 
awe the student. 

In the ghostly residuum of these psychological meditations we may 
perceive a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which mankind for cen- 
turies, nay, for thousands of years, has striven half unwittingly to 



THE ESSAYISTS 435 

keep veiled. I do not know, but it seems to me that the foreboding 
of this dreaded disclosure may account for many things in the obscure 
history of the race, for the long struggle of religion against the ob- 
servations of science which to-day we are wont to slur over as only 
a superficial struggle after all. In the haunting fear of this dis- 
closure I seem to see an explanation, if not a justification, of the 
obscurantism of the early church, of the bitter feud of Galileo and the 
burning of Giordano Bruno, of the recent hostility to Darwinism, and 
even of the present-day attempt to invalidate the significance of this 
long contest.^ 

In another and a far more unusual way he qualified himself 
for his high office of critic: he immured himself for two years 
in solitude, with books as his chief companions, and it was in 
this wilderness that the Shelhurne Essays — Shelburne was the 
name of the town of his hermitage — were born. His own ac- 
count is illuminating: 

In a secluded spot in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took 
upon myself to live two yeai*s as a hermit, after a mild Epicurean 
fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads omi- 
nously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any 
taint of insanity in the family; an old graj'-haired lady, a veritable 
saint, who had not been soured by her many deeds of charity, admon- 
ished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness of such a proceed- 
ing. ... As for the hermit . . . having found it impossible to educe 
any meaning from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself 
was whirled about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the effi- 
ciency of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been 
his education that he was actually better acquainted with the aspira- 
tions and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those 
of the modem toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He had been 
deafened by the "Indistinguishable roar" of the streets, and could make 
no sense of the noisy jargon of the market place.- 

The period gave him time to read, leisurely, thoughtfully, 
with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that read- 
ing was to be marketable. When he wrote his first papers he 
wrote with no press of need upon him. He had evolved his own 
notion of the function of literature and of the critic. This was 
what he evolved : and it is worthy of study : 

There is a kind of criticism tliat limits itself to looking at the thing 
in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. 

1 Shelburne Essays, Second Scries. 

2 "A Hermit's Note on Thoreau." Shelburne Essays, First Series. 



436 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

This is properly the way of sympathy, and those who choose this way 
are right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on 
what is ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is 
a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much di- 
rected to the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and 
to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No 
criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods 
exclusively, as no product of art can ever be entirely isolated in its 
genesis or altogether merged in the current of the day. The highest 
criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that 
neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would 
be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays fail to strike 
such a balance — I wish this were their only failure — they err sadly from 
the best model.^ 

In the eight volumes now issued there are eighty-five essays 
on topics as varied as George Crabbe, Hawthorne, Swinburne, 
Walt Whitman, The Bhagavad Gita, Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche. 
Nearly two-thirds of them all deal with representative English 
writers; some fifteen have to do with Americans. In the criti- 
cizing of them he has held steadfastly to the contention that 
men of letters are to be viewed not alone as individuals but as 
voices and as spiritual leaders in their generations. The soul 
of literature is not art and it is not alone beauty. For decadents 
like Swinburne he has small sympathy and he can even rebuke 
Charles Lamb for "his persistent refusal to face, in words at 
least, the graver issues of life." He takes his stand at a point 
so elevated that only the great masters who have been the origi- 
nal voices of the race are audible. He dares even to speak of 
"the jaunty optimism of Emerson," and to suggest that his 
confidence and serenity were all too often taken by his genera- 
tion for original wisdom. 

The foundation of his work is religious — religious in the 
fundamental, the oriental, sense of the word. He has been con- 
sistent and he has been courageous. That America has a critic 
with standards of criticism, an official critic in the sense that 
Sainte-Beuve was official, and that as editor of the leading criti- 
cal review of America this critic has a dominating clientele and 
a leader's authority, is one of the most promising signs for that 
new literary era which already is overdue. 

3 Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series. Preface. 



THE ESSAYISTS 487 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chables Dudley Warner. (1829-1900.) My Summer in a Garden, 
1870; Saunterings, 1872; Backlog Studies, 1872; The Gilded Age [with 
Mark Twain], 1873; Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing, 1874; Mij Winter 
on the Tslile Among the Mummies and Moslems, 1876; In the Levant, 1877; 
Being a Boy, 1877; In the Wilderness, 1878; Washington Irving, 1881; 
Captain John Smith, 1881; A Roundabout Journey, 1884; Their Pilgrim- 
age, 1887; On Horseback: a Tour in Virginia, Woi-th Carolina, and Tennes- 
see, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California, 1888; Studies in the 
South and West, tinth Comments on Canada, 1889; A Little Journey in 
the World: a Novel, 1889; Our Italy, 1891; As We Were Saying, 1891; 
As We Go, 1894; The Golden House, 1895; The People for Whom Shake- 
speare Wrote, 1897; The Relation of Literature to Life, 1897; That For- 
tune: a Novel, 1899; Fashions in Literature and Other Essays, 1902; Com- 
plete works, 15 vols. Edited by T. R. Lounsbury, 1904; Charles Dudley 
Warner, by Mrs. James T. Fields, 1904. 

Lafcadio Hearn. (1850-1904.) Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures: 
Stories from the Anvari-Soheili, Baitdl-Packisi, Mahabharuta, etc., 1884; 
Gombo ZhC'bes, 1885; Some Chinese Ghosts, 1887; Chita: a Memory of Last 
Island, 1889; Two Years in the French West Indies, 1890; Youma: the 
Story of a West Indian Slave, 1890; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894; 
Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan, 1895; Kokoro: Hints 
and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, 1896; Gleanings in Buddha-fields: 
Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East, 1897; Exotics and Retro- 
spectives, 1899; In Ghostly Japan, 1899; Shadowings, 1900; Japanese 
Miscellany, 1901; Eotto: Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobn-ebs, 
1902; Japanese Fairy Tales, 1903; Kwaidan, 1904; Japan: an Attempt at 
Interpretation, 1904; The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies, 
1905; Letters from the Raven: the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn 
vnth Henry Watkin, 1905, 1907; Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 
vols., by Elizabeth Bisland, 1906; Concerning Lafcadio Hearn, with a Bib- 
liography by Laura Stedman, by G. M. Gould, 1908; Japanese Letters of 
Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Elizabeth Bisland, 1910; Leaves from the Diary 
of an Impressionist: Early Writings; with an Introduction by Ferris 
Greenslet, 1911; Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, by Y. Noguchi, 1911; Lafcadio 
Hearn, by N. H. Kennard, 1912; Lafcadio Hearn, by E. Tliomas, 1912; 
Fantastics and Other Fancies, with an Introduction by Dr. Charles W 
Hutson, 1914. 

Agnes Repplier. (1857 .) Books and Men, 1888; Points of Vieio, 

1891; Essays in Miniature, 1892; Essays in Idleness, 1893; In the Dozy 
Hours and Other Papers, 1894; Varia, 1897; Philadelphia, the Place and 
the People, 1898; The Fireside Sphinx, 1901; Compromises, 1904; In Our 
Convent Days, 1905; A Happy Half Century, 1908; Americans and Others, 
1912; The Cat, 1912. 

Paux. Elmer More. (1864 .) Helena, and Occasional Poems, 1890; 

The Great Refusal: Letters of a Dreamer in Gotham, 1894; A Century of 



438 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1870 

Indian Epigrams; Chiefly from the Sanscrit of Bhartrihari, 1898; Shel- 
hurne Essays, First series, 1904; Second and Third series, 1905; Fourtli 
series, 1906; Fifth series, 1908; Sixth series, 1909; Seventh series, 1910; 
Eighth series, 1913; Nietzsche, 1912. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, C. C, IGO, 161. 
Addison, Joseph, 23. 
"Adler, Max," see H. C. Clark. 
Agassiz, Louis, 12. 
Airs from Arcady, 322, 334. 
Alcott, Bronson, 187, 350. 
Alcott, Louisa M., 63, 220, 221. 
Alden, Henry M., 300, 433. 
Aldrich, Anne Reeve, 338. 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 10, 16, 21, 

24, 51, 63, 66, 89, 119, 126-135, 

142, 186, 231, 309. 
Alice of Old Vincennes, 262, 404. 
Allen, Elizabeth Akers, 220, 338. 
Allen, James Lane, 15, 18, 365, 

382. 
Amher Gods, The, 225. 
American, The, 192, 194. 
American Anthology, An, 120, 321. 
American Men of Letters Series, 

419. 
Among the Isles of Shoals, 340. 
Andover Movement, 228. 
Anthon, Charles, 356. 
"Arp, Bill," see Smith, C. H. 
Artemus Ward, see Browne, C. F. 
Atherton, Gertrude, 410. 
Atlantic Monthly, 21, 64, 74, 114, 

126, 133, 204, 206, 227, 335, 372. 
Austin, Jane G., 220. 



Backlog Studies, 419. 

Bailey, Florence M., 161. 

Bailey, James Montgomery, 26, 

32. 
Balcony Stories, 363. 
Balestier, Wolcott, 397. 
Baldwin, Joseph G., 28, 84. 
Balzac, 13, 192, 238. 
Bancroft, George, 11. 
Bangs, John K., 43, 335. 
Barnard College, 350. 
Barriers Burned Away, 387. 
Barus, Clara, 161. 
Baskerville's Southern Writers, 348. 
Bates, Katharine Lee, 341 



Battles and Leaders of the Civil 

War, 416. 
Bayou Folks, 364. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 8, 63. 
Bellamv, Edward, 409, 414. 
Ben Hur, 254, 388, 389. 
Bennett, E. A., 402. 
Bierce, Ambrose, 24, 321, 373, 379, 

383. 
"Billings, Josh," see Shaw, H. W. 
Binns, H. B., 185. 
Bisland, Elizabeth, 437. 
Bjornsen, 83. 
Blake, H. G. O., 138. 
Boker, George Henry, 118, 120, 299. 
Bolles, Frank, 162. 
Bonner, Robert, 208, 385. 
Boston, 11, 62, 86, 212. 
Boutwell, George S., 40. 
Bowdoin College, 232. 
Bowles, Samuel, 386. 
Boyesen, H. H., 13, 409, 414. 
Boynton, Henry W., 82. 
Br'ead-winners,'^ The, 88, 385, 409. 
Bronte, Charlotte, 221, 226. 
Brown, Alice, 24, 220, 221, 240-243, 

321, 335. 
Browii University, 88. 
Browne, Charles Farrar, 25, 26, 31, 

33-37, 43, .50, 51, 56. 
Browne, Francis F., 433. 
Browning, Mrs., 221. 
Bryant, W. C, 10, 12, 19, 66, 118. 
Bucke, R. M., 185. 
Bulwer-Lvtton, 186, 224. 
Bunner, Henry C, 22, 24, 290, 322, 

333, 353. 372, 379. 
Burdette, Robert Jones, 26, 32. 
Burgess, Gelett, 335 
Burke, T. A., 84. 
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 221, 388, 

411. 
Burnhani, Clara Louise. 408, 413. 
Burroughs, John, 18, 21, 22, 111, 

141, 142, 144, 145, 146-1.54, 155, 

156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 182, 185, 

321. 



441 



442 



INDEX 



But Yet a Woman, 



Cable, George W., 15, 18, 21, 23, 

24, 79, 246-253, 269, 296. 
Callaway, Morgan, 293. 
Calvert, 13. 

Cape Cod Folks, 23, 86. 
Carleton, Will, 21, 86, 321-323, 326, 

352 
Carlyie, Thos., 275. 
Carman, Bliss, 354. 
Carpenter, Edward, 185. 
Carpenter, George Rice, 165. 
Carroll, C. C, 293. 
Carvel, Richard, 410. 
Cary Sisters, 19 
Castilian Days, 13, 88, 203. 
Castle Nowhere, 21, 221, 258. 
Catherwood, Mary Hartwell, 21, 

221, 258-262, 269. 
Cawein, Madison, 322, 346-349, 351, 

354. 
Centennial, The, 19, 118, 120, 282, 

285. 
Century of Dishonor, A., 255. 
Century Magazine, The, 42, 206, 

207, 342. 
Chambers, Robert W., 410. 
Chance Acquaintance, A., 205. 
Channing, W. E., 11. 
Choir Invisible, The, 369. 
Chopin, Kate, 318, 364-365, 382. 
Churchill, Winston, 403, 410. 
Circuit Rider, The, 93, 95. 
Clark, Charles Heber, 26. 
Clark, G. H., 293. 
Clarke, James Freeman, 11. 
Civil War, 3, 14, 18, 21, 25, 26, 40, 

116, 137. 
Clemens, John, 46. 
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 6, 11, 

18, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 45-62, 65, 

76, 86, 91, 99, 112, 113, 142, 178, 

191, 195, 217, 418. 
Cleveland, Grover, 404. 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 344. 
Cobb, Sylvanus, 217. 
Collins, Wilkie, 64. 
Colonel Carter of Cartersville, 269. 
Cone, Helen G., 341. 
Conway, Moncure D., 71. 
Conweil, R. H., 135. 
Cook, Rose Terry, 24, 209, 220, 227, 



228, 229-231, 233, 241, 321, 335, 

372. 
Cooke, John Esten, 264, 269. 
Coolbrith, Ina Donna, 322, 341. 
Cooper, J. F., 12, 61, 62, 217, 258, 

263. 
Country Doctor, A., 232. 
Countryman, The, 302. 
"Craddock, Charles Egbert," see 

Murfree, Mary N. 
Craik, Dinah Mulock, 64. 
Craneh, C. P., 19. 
Crane, Stephen, 397, 412. 
Crawford, F. Marion, 381, 389-393, 

411. 
Crisis, The, 403. 
Critic, The, 366, 433. 
Crothers, Samuel M., 432. 
Crumbling Idols, 373, 396, 401. 
Curtis, G. W., 8, 12, 417, 418. 

Daisy Miller, 192. 

Dana, C. A., 330, 333. 

Dana, R. H., 11, 417. 

"Danbury News Man," see Bailey, 

J. M. 
Danbury Neics, 32. 
Dartmouth College, 344, 351. 
Dartmouth Magazine, 350. 
Daudet, 192. 
David Harum, 389. 
Davis, R. H., 372, 373, 380, 383, 

397. 
Day, Holman F., 86, 410. 
Deephaven, 21, 86, 220, 355. 
Deland, Margaretta Wade, 221, 

335, 373, 389, 394-396, 411. 
Deming, Philander, 24, 379, 383. 
Densmore, Gilbert, 51. 
De Quincey, Thomas, 421, 426, 427. 
Derby, George Horatio, 28, 29, 30, 

43. 
Dial, The, 433. 
Dialect, 16, 266, 306. 
Dickens, Charles, 8, 23, 25, 35, 64, 

71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 92, 95, 98, 186. 
Dickinson, Emily, 220, 322, 340- 

341, 344. 
Disraeli, 224. 
Doctor Johns, 63. 
Dr. Sevier, 251. 
Dodge, Mary Abigail, 220. 
Dodge, Mary Mapes, 335. 
Donaldson, T., 185. 



INDEX 



443 



Drum-Taps, 172, 174. 
Drummond, Dr., 22, 86, 328. 
Dukesborough Tales, 294, 295, 300, 

307. 
Durket Sperrit, The, 316. 

East and West Poems, 85, 
Easy Chair, The, 210, 418. 
Eddy, Mary Baker G., 167. 
Edwards, Harry S., 298, 317, 320. 
Egan, Maurice F., 345, 433. 
Eggleston, Edward, 15, 18, 21, 23, 

92-95, 295, 301. 
Eggleston, George Gary, 98, 385. 
Eliot, George, 186, 190, 192, 284, 

309. 
Elliott, Sarah B., 316, 320. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 8, 11, 

12, 13, 19, 21, 30, 118, 138, 142, 

153, 159, 169, 172, 176, 177, 186. 
Europeans, The, 192. 
Everett, Edward, 11, 14. 

Fair God, The, 21, 388. 
Fearful Responsibility, A., 202. 
Field, Eugene, 22, 86, 322, 325, 329- 

333 353 
Field,' Roswell M., 353. 
Fields, James T., 342, 387. 
Fields, Mrs. James T., 235, 243. 
Fielding, Henry, 195. 
Fiske, John, 433. 
Fiske, Nathan W., 254. 
Flagg, Wilson, 144. 
Flaubert, 235, 248. 
Flute and Violin, 355, 306, 367. 
Flush Times, 28, 84. 
Foote, Mary Hallock, 221, 307, 407, 

413. 
Ford, Paul Leicester, 402, 403, 

404, 412. 
Foregone Conclusion, A., 202, 205, 

208. 
Foss, Sam Walter, 86, 328. 
Fox, John, Jr., 319, 410. 
Frederic, Harold, 397, 401, 402, 

412. 
Freeman, Mary E. Wllkins, 18, 24, 

202, 220, 221, 235-240, 321, 335, 

376. 
Fremont, John C., 100. 
French, Alice, 15, 24, 221, 278, 

307, 372, 373, 377-379, 383. 
Freneau, Philip, 121. 



Frost, A. B., 304. 

Fuller, Henry B., 409, 415. 

Fuller, Margaret, 11, 221. 

Gabriel Con/roy, 69, 80, 246. 
Garland, Hamlin, 24, 106, 307, 321, 

372, 373-377, 383, 400, 431. 
Gates Ajar, 03, 220, 222. 
Gayarre, Charles, 303. 
Georgia, 274, 297. 
Georgia Scenes, 28, 84, 264, 297. 
Gibson, William H., 160. 
Gilder, Jeanette B., 433. 
Gilder, Joseph B., 433. 
Gilder, R. W., 18, 21, 290, 300, 

321, 342-343, 353. 
Gildersleeve, Basil, 275. 
Gettysburg, 14. 
Glasgow, Ellen, 319, 410. 
Godey's Lady's Book, 20. 
Godkin, Edwin L., 433. 
Goodale, Dora Read, 341. 
Gordon, Armistead C., 206, 290. 
Gordon, John B., 297. 
Gosse, Edmund, 334, 345. 
Gould, George M., 136, 437. 
Grady, Henry W., 297. 
Grandissimes, The, 249. 
Grant, Robert, 409, 414. 
Grant, U. S., 41, 416. 
Graysons, The, 95, 98. 
Greeley, Horace, 12. 
Greenslet, Ferris, 136, 437. 
Griswold, Rufus, 8. 
Guardian Angel, The, 63. 
Guenn, 408. 

Guilded Age, The, 59, 61, 418. 
Guiney, Louise I., 243, 322, 341. 
Gummere, F. B., 185. 



"H. H.," see Helen Hunt Jackson. 

Habitant Ballads, 328. 

Hadley, Professor, 124. 

Hale, Edward E., 11, 299, 357. 

Hamilton College, 418. 

"Hamilton Gail," see Mary A. 

Dodge. 
Hammond, William H., 281. 
Bans Breitmann Ballads, 21. 
Hardy, A. S., 408, 414. 
Hardy, Tliomas, 83, 195, 235, 244. 

260, 298, ,309, 311. 315, 369. 
Harland, Henry, 397, 400. 



444 



INDEX 



"Harland, Marion," see Mary V. 

Terhune. 
Harned, T. B., 185. 
Harper's Monthly, 64, 65, 155, 

210, 227, 433. 
Harris, G. W., 15, 18, 24, 28, 83, 

84. 
Harris, Joel C, 250, 290, 291, 296, 

297, 301-306, 319, 321, 372. 
Harte, F. B., 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 29, 
--51, 55, 63-82, 84, 86, 87-90, 91, 

92, 98, 99, 187, 245. 
Harvard University, 11, 189, 398, 

434. 
Hawley, J. R., 418. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 11, 12, 14, 

45, 82, 215, 217, 233, 234, 245, 

357. 
Hawthorne, Julian, 408, 413. 
Hay, John, 13, 18, 21, 85, 86, 87, 

88, 90, 91, 99, 385, 409, 416. 
Haygood, Atticus G., 297. 
Hayne, Paul H., 10, 89, 271-274, 

292. 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 248, 364, 420-428, 

432, 434, 437. 
Hearth and Home, 92, 358, 374, 

386. 
Henley, W. E., 403. 
Henry, 0., 360, 373, 380. 
Herford, Oliver, 335. 
Herrick, Robert, 410. 
Hibbard, George A., 372. 
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 8, 

11, 63, 138, 144-146, 340, 357. 
Hill, Benjamin H., 297. 
Kingston, E. P., 44. 
Historical romance, 262, 403. 
Hitchcock, Ripley, 135. 
Hoar, Judge, 138. 
Holland, J. G., 10, 16, 85, 163, 

386, 410. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 11, 13, 19, 

25, 42, 61, 63, 64, 129, 309. 
Honorable Peter Stirling, The, 404. 
Hoosier Mosaics, 16, 21, 86. 
Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 21, 86, 

92, 374, 386. 
Hovey, Richard, 322, 349, 354. 
Howard, Blanche Willis, 220, 408, 

414. 
Howe, Herbert C, 102. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 163, 390. 
Howells, William Dean, 11, 12, 13, 



18, 21, 87, 122, 178, 186, 191, 
197-219, 227, 231, 234, 235, 244, 
309, 323, 347, 348, 372. 

Huckleberry Finn, 59, 308. 

Hugh Wynne, 403, 404. 

Hugo, v., 250. 

Humble Romance, A., 236, 237. 

Hyperion, 112, 277. 

Ibsen, H., 244, 373. 
Independent, The, 95, 114, 433. 
Indian Summer, 206. 
Innocents Abroad, 13, 20, 52-56. 
In Ole Virginia, 266, 318, 355. 
In the Tennessee Mountains, 86, 

221, 294, 307, 309, 355. 
In the Wilderness, 160. 
Iron Woman, The, 394. 
Irving, Washington, 8, 12, 25, 29, 

66, 69, 76, 417. 

"J. S. of Dale," see F. J. Stimson. 
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 18, 21, 220, 

221, 227, 245, 254-258, 267, 269, 

336. 
James, Henry, Jr., 21, 186-197, 199, 

201, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 

307, 381. 
James, Henry, Sr., 186-187, 193. 
Janice Meredith, 403, 404. 
Janvier, Thomas A., 372. 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 18, 21, 24, 220, 

221, 228, 231-235, 238, 241, 353. 
"Johnson, Benj. F.," see J. W. Ri- 
ley. 
Johnson, Robert U., 290. 
Johnston, Mary, 319, 403, 410. 
Johnston, Richard M., 21, 24, 295, 

297, 299-301, 319. 
Johns Hopkins University, 282. 
John Ward, Preacher, 389, 394. 
"Josh Billings," see H. W. Shaw. 
Judge, 43. 

Keats, John, 10, 119, 120. 
Kendall, W. S., 51. 
Kentucky Cardinal, A., 367, 368. 
Kennedy, John P., 263. 
"Kerr, Orpheus C," see R. H. New- 
ell. 
King, Clarence, 188. 
King, Edward, 247, 265. 
King, General Charles, 407, 413. 



INDEX 



445 



King, Grace, 24, 221, 318, 362- 

3G4, 382, 428. 
Kingsley, Charles, 186. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 70, 307, 389, 

397. 
Kirkland, Joseph, 374. 
Knitters in the Sun, 221, 307, 378. 
Knox College, 329. 

Lady of the Aroostook, The, 210, 

213. 
Lady of Fort St. John, 261. 
Lady, or the Tiger, The, 359. 
Lamplighter, The, 254. 
Landon, Melvin D., 26, 32, 44. 
Landor, VV. S., 124, 153. 
Lane, T. W., 84. 
Lanier, Clifford, 279. 
Lanier, Sidney, 21, 22, 63, 86, 271, 

274-280, 293, 296, 300, 305, 349. 
Lathrop, Rose H., 221. 
Lazarus, Emma, 322, 336-338. 
Learned, Walter, 335. 
Leaves of Grass, 163, 172. 
Led Horse Claim, The, 221. 
Leiand, C. G., 21. 
Lewis, Charles B., 26, 32. 
Life, 43, 335. 
Life on the Mississippi, 58. 
Lincoln, A., 26, 27, 89, 142. 
Lincoln, Life of, by Nicolay and 

Hay, 88. 
Literary World, The, 296, 318. 
Little Corporal, The, 95. 
Little Lord Fauntleroy, 388. 
Little Women, 220. 
Locke, David Ross, 26, 32, 37-40, 

44. 
London, Jack, 410. 
Longfellow, Henry W., 8, 10, 11, 

12, 18, 19, 52, 66, 118, 126, 127, 

142, 153, 181, 186, 217, 277, 417. 
Lonfjstreet, Augustus B., 28, 84, 297, 

300. 
Loma Doone, 402. 
Looking Backward, 409. 
Lowell, James Russell, 11, 12, 14, 

19, 20, 22, 25, 120, 121, 124, 138, 

139, 142, 153, 163, 167, 186, 228, 

230, 433. 
Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 21, 

65, 73, 355, 357. 
Ludlow, Fitzhugh, 51. 
Lummis, Charles F., 106. 



Lyceum, The, 8, 10. 

Mabie, Hamilton VV., 433. 

M'Carthy, Justin, 64. 

McConnel, J. L., 84. 

MacDonald, George, 387. 

Macon, J. A., 266. 

Madame Delphine, 252. 

Mahau, Capt., 416. 

Main-Traveled Roads, 355, 374, 

431. 
Major Jones's Chronicles, 298. 
Malbone, 63. 
Major, Charles, 403. 
Mark Twain, see Clemens, S. L. 
Matthews, J. Brander, 333, 353, 

372, 433. 
"Marjorie Daw," 21, 360. 
"Mars Chan," 265, 307. 
Maupassant, 197, 235, 238, 244, 

373 
Maynard, M. T., 185. 
Meadow Grass, 240. 
Melville, Herman, 163. 
Menken, Adah Isaacs, 51. 
Mercier College, 299. 
MerAvin, C. H., 66, 75, 82. 
Methodism, 96. 
]\Iifflin, Lloyd, 345. 
Millet, 13. 
Miller, Joaquin, 15, 18, 21, 22, 51, 

61, 99-115. 
Miller, Olive Thome, 160. 
Minis, Edwin, 293. 
Minister's Charge, The, 200, 208, 

200. 
Minister's Wooing, The. 228. 
Mitchell, Donald 'G., 63, 417. 
Mitchell, S. Weir, 321, 345, 403, 

404, 405-407, 412. 
Modern Instance, A., 206, 209. 
Monsieur Bcaucaire, 262, 403. 
"Monsieur Motte," 221, 362. 
More, Paul Elmer, 432, 434-436, 

437. 
Morris, G. P., 12. 
Motley, J. L., 11. 
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 220, 

336. 
"M. Quad," see C. B. Lewis. 
Mr. Isaacs, 389. 

Mrs. Partington's Carpet Bag, 33. 
Muir, John. 21, 61, 99, 108, 111, 

113, 154-159, 161, 165, 182. 



446 



INDEX 



Mulford, Prentice, 51. 
Munkittrick, R. K., 335. ^ 

Murfree, Mary JSIoailles, 15, 18, 21, 
24, 221, 278, 3U7, 308-31G, 319. 
Murray, W. H. H., IGO. 
My Study Windous, 138. 
My Summer in a Garden, 21, 419. 

"Nasby, Petroleum V.," see D. R. 

Locke. 
Nast, Thomas, 26, 40-41, 43, 44. 
Nation, The, 433. 
Newell, Robert Henry, 26, 32, 51. 
New Day, The, 21, 342. 
New England, 6, 7, 14, 63, 234. 
New England Nun, A, 237, 355. 
New England School, 220. 
New Hampshire, 6. 
Neic York Ledger, 205. 
Nicholson, Meredith, 410. 
Norris, Frank, 396, 398-400, 412. 
Norris, W. E., 87. 
North American Rexnew, 7, 25, 32, 

124, 138, 201, 244, 355, 433. 
Norton, C. E., 11, 12, 18, 65. 
Novel, What It Is, The, 392. 
Nye, Bill, see E. W Nye. 
Nye, Edgar Wilson, 26, 32, 325, 

352. 

O'Brien, Fitz-James, 357. 

O'Connor, VV. D., 175, 185, 372. 

Oglethorpe University, 275. 

Old Chester Tales, 394. 

Old Creole Days, 21, 86, 247, 294, 

355. 
Oldtoicn Folks, 63, 229. 
One Summer, 220, 408. 
O'Reilly, John Boyle, 21, 321, 345. 
Our Old Home, 13. 
Outlook, The, 433. 
Outing, 160. 

Our National Parks, 158. 
Outre-Mer, 12, 52, 203, 417. 
Overland Monthly, 55, 65, 67, 68, 

69, 73, 84, 104, 155. 

Page, Thomas Nelson, 15, 19, 24, 
79, 83, 245, 265-269, 270, 291, 
307, 321, 372. 

Paine, A. B,, 44, 62. 

Parker, Theodore, 11. 

Parkman, Francis, 11, 259, 416. 



Parsons, T. W., 11, 19, 163, 350. 

Passionate Pilgrim, A., 21. 

Pater, Walter, 197. 

"Paul, John," see C. H. Webb. 

Paulding, J. K., 25. 

Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 229, 

231. 
Peck, Samuel Minturn, 335. 
Pembroke, 239. 
Pencillings by the Way, 12, 52, 

417. 
Peniberton, T. Edgar, 71, 82. 
"Perkins, Eli,'' see M. i). Landon. 
Perry, Nora, 88, 220. 
Perry, Bliss, 165, 185, 403, 410, 

433. 
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, see Ward. 
Phillips, David Graham, 410. 
Phillips, Wendell, 8, 11. 
"Phoenix, John," see G. H. Derby. 
Phoemxtana, 28, 84. 
Piatt, J. J., 18, 200, 322, 323, 352. 
Piatt, Sarah M., 352. 
Pike County, 30, 46, 72, 83-98, 113, 

115, 178. 
Pike County Ballads, 21. 85, 321. 
Pit, The, 399. 
"Plain Language from Truthful 

James," 67, 84, 321. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 118, 356, 357, 

379. 
Poems of the Orient, 127. 
Poems of Two Friends, 200, 323. 
Pond, Major, 40. 
Prescott, W H., 11. 
Preston, Margaret J., 272, 292. 
Price, Thomas R., 275. 
Prince, Oliver H., 298. 
Puck, 43, 333. 
Punch, 43. 

Ramona, 254. 

Read, Opie, 26. 

Read, Thomas Buchanan, 118, 120, 

299. 
Reade, Charles, 64. 224. 
Realism, 17, 178, ' 184, 191, 208, 

244, 298, 396, 401. 
Red Badge of Courage, The, 397. 
Red Rock, 267. 
Reid, Whitelaw, 253. 
Reign of Law, The, 369, 370. 
Repplier, Agnes. 428-432, 437. 
Rice, Alice Hegan, 410. 



INDEX 



447 



Richard Carvel, 403. 
Richardson, Charles F., 9, 434. 
Richardson, Samuel, 212, 213, 215, 

429. 
Rickett, A., 185. 
Riggs, Kate Douglas Wiggin, 220, 

335. 
Riley, James Whiteomb, 18, 22, 

86, 307, 324-328, 352. 
Rives, Amelie, 318. 
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 206, 

209. 
Robertson, T. W., 44. 
Robinson, Rowland E., 231, 379. 

383. 
Roche, James J., 335. 
Roderick Hudson, 192. 
Rodman the Keeper, 294, 317. 
Roe, E. P., 323, 386, 387-389, 410. 
Romance of Dollard, 261. 
Romanticism, 18, 245, 402. 
Ross, Clinton, 372. 
Rossetti, D. G., 21. 
Rossetti, W. M., 105, 111. 
Roughing It, 56, 58. 
Round Table, The, 271. 
Rudder Grange, 21, 359. 
Russell, Irwin, 18, 21, 83, 85, 265, 

279, 288-290, 293, 305, 322. 
Ryan, Abram J., 345. 

St. Elmo, 225, 228, 264, 268. 

St. Nicholas, 95, 358. 

Sam Laicsons Fireside Stories, 86. 

Saracinesca, 390. 

Saturday Club, 11. 

Saxe, John G., 25, 335. 

Saxe Hohm Stories, 21, 220, 254. 

Science and Health, 170. 

Science of English Verse, 284. 

Scollard, Clinton, 322, 335, 347. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 207. 

Scribner's Monthly, 9, 19, 20, 21. 

64, 114, 155, 265, 342, 358, 3S6 
Scudder, Horace E., 135, 264, 433. 
Service, Robert W., 86. 
Shaw, Henry Wheeler, 16, 18, 26, 

27, 31, 41-42, 44, 50. 
Shelburne Essays, 434, 435. 
Shelley, P. B.. 119 
Sheppard, Elizabeth, 224 
Sherman, Frank Dempster, 345. 
Shillaber, P. B., 25, 33. 
Short Sixes, 334, 379. 



Short Story, The, 79, 355-382. 
Sill, E. R, 89, 322, 342, 343-345, 

354. 
Simms, W. G., 263. 
Singular Life, A, 223. 
Sketch-Book, The, 12, 417. 
Slosson, Anne Trumbull, 220, 231. 
Smith, Charles Henry, 26, 32, 298. 
Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 15, 18, 

269, 373, 409, 415. 
Smith, F. S., 44. 
Smith, Seba, 25. 
Smith, Sol, 84. 
Smyth, A. H., 135. 
Songs of the Sierras, 21, 105, 

321. 
Songs of the Southern Seas, 21. 
South, The Old, 262 
Southern literature, 294. 
Southern Magazine, The, 299. 
Spofford, Harriet, Prescott, 220, 

222, 225-228, 230. 235, 335. 
Springfield Republican, 386. 
Stedman, Edmund C, 9, 10, 16, 18, 

22, 31, 32. 66, 89, 119, 120, 121, 

122-126, 133, 153, 160, 175, 343. 
Stedman, Laura, 136, 437. 
Stevenson, R. L . 10, 138, 240, 403. 
Stimson, Frederic J., 409, 415. 
Stockton, Frank R, 18, 21, 23, 

24, 358-361, 372, 382. 
Stoddard, C W , 10, 13, 16, 51, 06, 

67, 89, 103, 106, 117, 118, 345. 
Stoddard. R. H, 117, 118, 119, 120, 

121, 126, 128, 135, 140, 152. 
Stone, Melville E , 330. 
Story, W. W., 120, 163, 299. 
Story of a Bad Boy, 63. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11, 12. 62, 

63, 186, 221, 222, 228, 229, 233. 
Stowe, Charles E, 242. 
Sumner, Charles, 11, 44. 
Sut Lovenqood's Yarns, 84. 
Sweden borg, 8, 186, 198. 
Sweet, Alexander E., 26, 32. 
Swinburne, A. C.. 21. 
Sj'monds, J. Addington, 21, 185. 



Tabb, John B. 276, 322, 343. 
Taine, H, 92 

Tarkington, Booth, 403, 410 
Taylor, Bavard, 8. 10, 12, 16, 19. 
31, 32, 52, 03, 06, 84, 116, 117, 



448 



INDEX 



118, 119, 120, 121, 126, J40, 142. 

152, 217, 
Taylor, Marie Hansen, 135. 
Temple, Charlotte, 8. 
Terhune, Mary V., 269. 
Tensas, Madison, 84. 
Thackeray, W. M., 64. 
"Thanet, Octave," see Alice French. 
That Lass o' Lowrie's, 21, 221, 

388. 
Thaxter, Celia, 18, 21, 220, 321, 

338-340, 353. 
Their Wedding Journey, 21, 204. 
Thomas, Edith M., 221, 322, 341- 

342, 353. 
Thompson, Denman, 326. 
Thompson, Maurice, 16, 21, 159- 

160, 324, 40L 403, 418, 433. 
Thompson, Slason, 353. 
Thompson, William T., 298. 
Thoreau, Henry D., 11, 21, 99, 137, 

144, 145, 147, 149. 150, 151, 155, 

157, 158. 161, 163, 165, 171, 178, 

181, 182, 321. 
Ticknor, Caroline, 98. 
Ticknor, Francis O., 272, 298. 
Ticknor, George, 11. 
Tiger-Lilies, 277. 
Timothy Titcomb Letters, 387. 
Timrod, Henry, 272, 292. 
To Have and to Hold, 403. 
Token, The, 8. 244. 
Tolstoy, 13, 83, 19.5, 210, 244, 373, 

409. 
Tory Lover, The, 234. 
Torrey, Bradford, 160, 161, 433. 
Tourgee, Albion W., 21, 294, 317. 
Tourgenietf, S3, 195. 
To\\Tisend, Edward W., 380 
Transcendentalists, 186. 
Traubel, Horace, 165, 185. 
Tribune Primer, The, 329. 
Triggs, O. L., 185. 
Trollope, A., 64. 
TroUope. Mrs. T. A., 64. 
Trowbridge, J. T , 63. 
Turner, J. A., 302. 

Vncle Remus, His Songs and Say- 
ings, 304. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 67, 228, 250, 
257, 386. 

University of California. 398. 

University of Missouri, 329. 



University of Pennsylvania, 405. 

418. 
University of Virginia, 265. 

Van Dyke, Henry, 342, 433. 
Venetian Life, 13, 203. 
Venner, Elsie, 63, 228. 
Vers de Soci^te, 334, 335. 
Views Afoot, 12, 203. 

Wallace, Lew, 21, 253-254. 321, 388. 
Walden, 137. 

Wake-Robm, 21, 144, 148. 
"Ward, Artemus," see C. F. Browne. 
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 63, 

65, 220, 221, 236, 321, 335, 372. 
Ward, William Hayes, 293. 
Warner, Charles Dudley, 18, 21, 

160, 418-420, 429, 437. 
Webb, Charles Henry, 26, 32, 51, 

67. 
Webster, Daniel, 11. 
Week on the Concord and Merri- 

mac Rivers, 137. 
Wells, Carolyn, 335. 
Wendell, Barrett, 11, 434. 
Wesleyan Female College, 298. 
Wharton, Edith, 410. 
When Knighthood Was in Flower, 

403. 
W^iipple, E. P., 163. 
Whitcomb's Chronological Outlines, 

63. 
White, Greenough, 9. 
White, Stewart E., 410. 
Whitman, Mrs, 88. 
Whitman, Walt, 18, 21, 22, 99, 

139, 142, 147, 152, 163-185, 217. 
Whittier, John G, 11, 12, 19, 186. 
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 338. 
Wiggin, Kate Douglas, see Eiggs. 
Wilkins, Mary E , see Freeman. 
Williams College, 329, 387. 
Willis, N. P., 8, 12, 52, 66, 118, 

126, 417. 
Wilson, Augusta J Evans, 225. 
Wilson, Robert B, 322, 346-347, 

354. 
Wilson, Woodrovv, 262, 418. 
Winter, William, 123. 
Wister, Owen, 410. 
Woman's Reason, A., 12, 306. 
Women in literature, 335. 



INDEX 



449 



Woodberry, George E., 322, 342, Wordsworth, William, 22. 

343, 433. 
Woolson, Constance Feniinore, 21, Yale University, 122, 343. 

24, 221, 258, 290, 317-318, 31!), 

321, 335. "- Zola, 212, 397. 



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